Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century 9783110854305, 9783110096002

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Understanding Popular Culture Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century

New Babylon

Studies in the Social Sciences

40

MOUTON PUBLISHERS

BERLIN NEW YORK

AMSTERDAM

Understanding Popular Culture Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century Edited by Steven L.Kaplan

MOUTON PUBLISHERS BERLIN NEW YORK AMSTERDAM

Steven L. Kaplan Director Western Societies Program Center for International Studies Cornell University Ithaca, New York 14853

USA

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Understanding popular culture. (New Babylon : 40) Includes index. 1. Europe - Popular culture - History - Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Europe - Religious life and customs Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Folklore - Europa Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Kaplan, Steven L. CB 203.U54 1984 306'.4'094 84-1001 ISBN 3-11-009600-5

CIP-Kurztitelaufnähme der Deutschen Bibliothek Understanding popular culture / Steven L. Kaplan (ed.). - Berlin ; New York ; Amsterdam : Mouton, 1984. (New Babylon ; 40) ISBN 3-11-009600-5 NE : Kaplan, Steven [ Hrsg. ]; GT

© Copyright 1984 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form - by photoprint, microfilm, or any other means - nor transmitted nor translated into a machine language without written permission from the publisher. Typesetting: COPO Typesetting, Bangkok, Thailand. - Printing: Druckerei Gerike GmbH, Berlin. - Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin. - Cover design: K. Lothar Hildebrand, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

This book is dedicated to BRONISLAW GEREMEK whose absence from these pages attests to his passionate involvement in the popular culture of contemporary Poland

Contents

Preface

1

Chapter I. David Hall Introduction

5

Chapter II. Jacques Le Goff The Learned and Popular Dimensions of Journeys in the Οtherworld in the Middle Ages

19

Chapter III. Carlo Ginzburg The Witches' Sabbat: Popular Cult or Inquisitorial Stereotype?

39

Chapter IV. Mary R. O'Neil Sacerdote ovvero strione. Ecclesiastical and Superstitious Remedies in 16th Century Italy

53

Chapter V. Clive Holmes Popular Culture? Witches, Magistrates, and Divines in Early Modern England

85

Chapter VI. H. C. Erik Midelfort Sin, Melancholy, Obsession: Insanity and Culture in 16th Century Germany 113

VIII

Contents

Chapter VII. Günther Lottes Popular Culture and the Early Modern State in 16th Century Germany 147 Chapter VIII. Richard C. Trexler We Think, They Act: Clerical Readings of Missionary Theatre in 16th Century New Spain 189 Chapter IX. Roger Chartier Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modem France 229 Chapter X. Jacques Revel Forms of Expertise: Intellectuals and "Popular" Culture in France (1650-1800) 255 Chapter XI. Hans-Ulrich Thamer On the Use and Abuse of Handicraft: Journeyman Culture and Enlightened Public Opinion in 18th and 19th Century Germany 275 Notes on the Contributors

301

Index

305

Preface

STEVEN LAURENCE KAPLAN

In recent years, the historical study of popular culture has flourished within several different academic disciplines. Yet the notion of popular culture itself remains clouded by conceptual uncertainties. What is signified by the "popular" in popular culture? Is it fruitful simply to identify (or perceive) it by juxtaposing it to, and thereby distinguishing it from, the dominant culture? Or does such an approach imply an uncritical adoption of the category of "domination"? Are binary formulations such as high/low and learned/unlearned compelling? Does the frontier between high and low remain an analytically useful line of demarcation? Is it sufficient to define "popular" in terms of the artifacts in which the quality is supposed to inhere - in a given body of texts, values, modes of behavior? Or is an approach that stresses the diffusion of these cultural objects through their societies better suited to locating and labeling the "popular"? Might it not be more illuminating to shift our emphasis away from the objects themselves, and their dissemination, to the diverse ways in which, by accident and by design, they are perceived, used, and transformed? What is the relation between the way in which a society is stratified, on the one hand, and the provenance and dissemination of popular culture, on the other? Similarly, what is the relationship between political consciousness and action, on the one hand, and popular culture, on the other? How can we best articulate connections among the diverse ways in which popular culture manifests itself (for example, the relation between oral and written discourse)? How should we

2

Preface

conceive the relations among popular, folk, mass, and high culture? How does the process by which popular culture is transmitted across time — what some scholars call "reproduction" — differ from that of elite cultures? How should the study of popular culture be related to other kinds of historical inquiry in more or less contiguous areas such as social history, or the history of collective mentalities, or intellectual history, or political history? Convinced that it was a propitious time to reappraise our understanding of popular culture, Michael Kämmen and I convened an international conference at Cornell University at the end of April 1982. The conference ranged widely across Europe and America, from medieval times through the mid 20th century. This book consists of ten of the papers presented at the conference. Focusing on Europe before 1815, these essays address many of the questions on our agenda in a fresh and stimulating manner. Combining theoretical reflection with original empirical research, they suggest new ways to apprehend and to interpret popular culture. The authors are English, French, German, and American scholars specializing in European history. David Hall, who participated in the conference as a commentator, brings an Americanist's perspective to the Introduction. This book owes a great deal intellectually to the other conference participants, absent from this volume, whose papers and critical comments enriched the discussion and led the authors of these essays to rethink certain assumptions and to sharpen their arguments. The authors join me in acknowledging our debt to James Boon (Cornell), Stuart Clark (University of Wales College at Swansea), Herbert J. Gans (Columbia University), Davydd Greenwood (Cornell), Neil Harris (University of Chicago), Temma Kaplan (University of California at Los Angeles), John Kasson (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Dominick LaCapra (Cornell), Yves Lequin (University de Lyon II), Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (College de France and Cornell), Hans Medick (MaxPlanck-Institut für Geschichte, Gottingen), and Jonathan Wylie (Cambridge, Massachusetts). All of us at the conference felt impoverished and outraged by the involuntary absence of the eminent Polish historian Bronislaw Geremek, incarcerated for his heroic combat as a member of Solidarity. Neither this book nor the conference that spawned it would have seen the light of day but for the dedicated labor of my

Preface

3

colleague Michael Kämmen. Cosmopolitan, sensitive, and resourceful, he was an ideal collaborator. Nor could we have held the conference without the financial support of the following agencies, to whom we are deeply grateful: the Western Societies Program of the Center for International Studies at Cornell University; the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; the Maison des Sciences de 1'Homme, Paris; the French-American Foundation; the Society for the Humanities at Cornell; the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell; and the Cornell departments of History, German Literature, and Romance Studies. We thank Ms. Pam Lane for her skillful assistance in organizing the conference. It was a pleasure to work with our copy editor, Roger Haydon, whose urbanity and good sense improved this book in sundry ways. We are obliged to Professor Jane P. Kaplan of Ithaca College and Professor James J. John and Mr. Robert Whalen of Cornell University for vetting several of the translations. Ms. Pat Carlson did a superb job of typing. Dr. Gerard Moran of Amsterdam provided expert counsel both as a historian and as an editor. Ithaca, New York June 1983

S. L. K.

Introduction

DAVID HALL

The historian of popular culture is in pursuit of an elusive quarry.1 No one knows exactly what this quarry looks like, or even who "the people" are whose culture is at issue. Anyone who intervenes to serve as guide is suspect; the intermediary is by definition different from the subject. The essays in Understanding Popular Culture are exemplary in their awareness of the problems that beset the historian. These essays are useful as description, since they enrich in many ways our knowledge of the past. Some take up such classic topics as witchcraft and the livrets bleus; others move in new directions. In their range these essays serve as illustrations of the wealth of sources that lie open to investigation. But their special merit is their spirit of reflection. Each one is an exercise in self-criticism, for the history of popular culture has reached a point where we must think anew about the premises on which the field is founded. The history of popular culture grows from the perception of division or difference: the culture of "the people" differs from the culture of "elites." There is no lack of efforts to draw a line between these types, or to declare that such a line functioned as a real boundary. But it is characteristic of our present situation that we seek more nuance than may have been the case before. Thus, the contributors to Understanding Popular Culture agree in recognizing that artifacts of culture cannot be automatically distributed among the social groups or classes that make up society. Culture has a social basis, but the relationship of culture to society is more fluid than the very phrase "popular culture" may permit. The rethinking that these essays represent proceeds in four directions. The first is to describe how representations of popular

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David Hall

culture, representations that have at best a problematic bearing on the thing-in-itself, emerged in the past. Peter Burke began his Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe with a chapter on "The Discovery of the People" in late 18th and early 19th century Europe. That event hardly marked the first representation of popular culture, however. Jacques Revel and Roger Chartier carry the story back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when clerical reformers tried to liberate the Christian church from certain "false" beliefs. Even this great movement had antecedents in the church of the middle ages, and the distinction between true belief and "superstition" dates back to late antiquity.2 In 17th century France, the animus toward superstition arose anew in JeanBaptiste Thiers, who collected examples of the errors he condemned in the Traite des Superstitions (1679; 1702). Across the Channel, Henry Bourne, a Church of England clergyman, was assembling the materials for Antiquitates Vulgäres; or, The Antiquities of the Country People (1725). In retrospect, we recognize the politics that Bourne brought to his sources even as we use them for our own devices.3 Everywhere in early modern Europe, the authorities were out to reform popular culture in the name of their own values. In 16th century Germany, as Erik Midelfort and Hans-Ulrich Thamer note, the efforts of the clergy were supplemented by secular authorities and academic specialists. By the close of the 17th century a coalition of clergy, freethinkers, philosophers, and scientists was seeking to emancipate mankind from beliefs in witchcraft, apparitions, portents, prophecy, special providence, and miracles. On the whole, these critics were successful in achieving the disenchantment they sought.4 In 18th century Europe, the rise of classicism stimulated another round of attacks on certain social practices and customs. The situation changed once again, and decisively, in the early 19th century, as popular culture, to its interpreters, assumed a different guise. Hitherto, popular culture had been defined by a process of exclusion (which was never, of course, to define what it really consisted of). In the making of this new configuration the key figures were moved by sympathy for a way of life that, imperiled by the pace of change, still lingered on at the margins of society. This perception stirred Sir Walter Scott to collect and preserve certain customs before they vanished altogether. Scott

Introduction

7

and his contemporaries on the Continent believed that they had stumbled upon the remnants of a "rural" culture, one with roots that stretched far back in time.5 This was a culture that sustained its songs and stories by "oral tradition," as well as one that confused "magic" with "religion." In arriving at this representation of popular culture, the antiquarians and folklorists of the early 19th century were prisoners of their own position. They came from the upper classes, to whom the people were a mysterious Them, described in terms their discoverers were not (or thought they were not): the people were natural, simple, illiterate, instinctive, irrational, rooted in tradition, and in the soil of the region, lacking any sense of individuality.6

These same antiquarians were powerfully caught up in romantic nationalism, which stood classicism on its head by preferring the local to the universal, the heart to the head, the vernacular to the cosmopolitan. Poets were now to draw their subjects and their very language from "the people," to sing "the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan," as Emerson would say in America, echoing Wordsworth and Coleridge. Romanticism thereby generated the concept of the "folk" as set apart and living in a special culture of their own. This quick overview of representations of popular culture leads to several observations. I borrow one of them from Günther Lottes, who, in calling for a more precise and detailed integration of culture and society, expresses disappointment with the vagueness of "the people" in most modern studies of popular belief. His criticism has wide application. In no theory from the past, whether Scott's or Bourne's or some medieval cleric's, was the "social localization" of belief — the phrase is Lottes' — ever made specific. Our efforts to succeed in this direction are complicated by the stock words that we inherit from old ideologies. In his essay, Roger Chartier warns against transposing terms from one context into another: "Historians, thinking that they had identified popular culture, had in fact merely described in different words the fundamental distinction that the Church had made to 'disqualify' a set of thoughts and practices." This comment has a broader relevance. One conception of popular culture may seem to differ greatly from another, as the history of "forms of expertise" would seek to demonstrate. But

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David Hall

alongside change there was also continuity. Certain terms have been handed down for centuries, to reappear in modern dress as categories of our own interpretations. Consider, for example, the word "illiteratus," which in the middle ages denoted the line between the Latin culture of the clergy and the vernacular culture of the laity. "Illiteratus" does not mean the same as illiterate, and it has no bearing whatsoever on the concept of "oral culture." Yet this category continues to inform the familiar and quite common pairing of oral-illiterate-lay versus print-literate-clerical.7 "Superstition" is yet another word that will not go away; nor will its opposite, the "rational" or the "scientific." "Magic" and "religion" also have long histories, and the sequence of peasantrural-folk extends into the present. It seems fair to say that all these words contain misleading implications. The messages in books were not foreclosed to the illiterate. The clergy cannot always be distinguished from the people. Magic stubbornly resists our efforts to distinguish it from religion.8 Worse yet, these words enforce a separation between cultures that is surely too extreme. Words like "superstition" are suspect, finally, because they arise out of the learned tradition and not from popular culture itself. They are words that imply some deviation from a norm, whether it be orthodox Christianity, or rationality, or cosmopolitanism. Originating with some group that wants to make discriminations, these words impose a world view on the people that may never have been theirs. Supposing that a separate culture did exist, these words discredit its coherence and legitimacy. To undertake a history of representations of popular culture is eventually to arrive at the point of doubting whether we can ever describe the thing in itself. The essays in Understanding Popular Culture do not capitulate to such total skepticism. They retain a confidence in the search while agreeing on the imperative, here voiced most clearly by Hans-Ulrich Thamer, that research on representations of popular culture must be a part of the analysis of popular culture itself. How, then, to track our quarry? The second direction in which these essays move is to affirm that folklore offers "empirical data of unquestionable value." These words of Jacques Le Goffs imply the dubious value of many data. But let me emphasize the positive. Le Goff has found a major source of data in the Motif-

Introduction

9

Index developed by the American folklorist Stith Thompson.9 In his essay, Le Goff draws on the Motif-Index to distinguish between learned and folkloric elements in imaginary voyages to the otherworld. He and others, such as Jean-Claude Schmitt, move on to trace the history of the interaction of these elements and then to specify how clerical or learned culture imposed changes upon the folklore. Elsewhere in this volume, Carlo Ginzburg relies on folklore or mythology in arguing that the concept of the witches' sabbath originated "from below" as well as from the learned culture; he, like Le Goff, is concerned to uncover a "layer of popular culture" with an integrity of its own. Is it really possible to accord such privileged status to folklore? The Motif-Index seems thoroughly empirical, representing, as it does, one phase of the effort to make a science out of comparative mythology and folklore. I would suggest, however, that the motifs it contains emerge from several contexts or traditions. As one example, let me cite C. Grant Loomis's White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend, which presents the legends of the saints as folklore. Loomis drew on literary sources that were clerical in origin or, at best, a mixture of some sort; he did not make the discriminations that Le Goff pursues so ably in his essay.10 Incorporating in its vast sweep the stories in White Magic, the Motif-Index becomes a composite, reflecting back a "folklore" that has many different sources. We must be wary, also, of confounding the Anglo-Scandinavian inquiry into folklore with the meaning of this term to social theorists such as Gramsci, to whom it signified an autonomous, coherent system. That meaning, which informs the work of Ginzburg, is open to another set of objections, at least when it is used to interpret specific texts and situations.11 What qualifies as folklore may have originated in systems, sometimes learned, sometimes not, that long since disintegrated. In 19th century England, many persons became critical of beliefs concerning nature that seemed "the traditionary sympathies of a most rustic ignorance." But as Keith Thomas has recently observed, some of these beliefs were lore "derived from classical sources, like Pliny's Natural History, and were learned errors rather than vulgar ones." And Thomas goes on to observe that "it is often hard to tell how seriously these notions were held

10

David Hall

and how widely . . . let alone whether they fitted together into one coherent cosmology or are better regarded as isolated 'superstitions,' long severed from their original moorings in an integrated view of the world."12 Peter Burke has other reasons, like the role of intermediaries, for being skeptical of folklore's purity. As Burke and others note, English ballads, once thought to be the products of a self-contained oral tradition, turn out to have depended for transmission on the activity of printers.13 When scrutinized so closely, folklore, and the folk, lose some of the innocence they were accorded in the 19th century. Still, it may be possible to peel the onion until we reach a layer that is "of the people." This is a task or problem with every source we use. Several of the essays in Understanding Popular Culture are notable for using sources that have never been fully exploited. Clive Holmes, for example, examines English witchcraft through court records. He is well aware of the difficulties: the witchcraft records arose from a "most complex social process." The actors and informants spoke for and represented different social levels. But Holmes persists, ending with an inventory of beliefs he labels "popular." It requires a specialist to evaluate his list, though to my eye the affinity between women and the Devil appears as much a theme of learned as of popular belief. His essay is impressive in its cautions. To him it is clear that interchange was taking place, and he rightly adds that popular belief was not "unchanging" and "inert." A third direction in which these essays move is to define popular culture as the culture of the "subordinate classes." No one in this volume argues sharply for this point of view, though it informs all of these essays. It is a point of view with political as well as methodological implications. In our day, it is the historian of radical or "Left" persuasion who seems especially committed to uncovering the culture of the people. "In the past," Carlo Ginzburg remarks in his preface to The Cheese and the Worms, historians could be accused of wanting to know only about "the great deeds of kings," but today this is certainly no longer true. More and more they are turning toward what their predecessors passed over in silence, discarded, or simply ignored. 'Who built Thebes of the seven gates?' Bertolt Brecht's 'literate worker' was already asking. The sources tell us nothing about these anonymous masons, but the question retains all its significance.14

Introduction

11

In their different fashions, Natalie Davis and E. P. Thompson have made the same claim of significance, and there are echoes of that claim in several of the essays here. To recognize the "social creativity of the so-called inarticulate" is now almost a necessity for those who go in search of popular belief.15 So, too, we owe to this tradition the important argument that the culture of the people had coherence and integrity; that it was not a culture lacking order or composed of fragments of "elite" belief. In recent years, Natalie Davis has been especially insistent that the people were not passive ciphers; even if the people learned from clergy and their like, the process of consumption was a process of re-working and revision. Any theory of popular culture, Davis argues, must acknowledge the competence of the lower orders, a competence so often denied them by elite groups in the past.16 This shift in point of view has led to the important recognition that popular culture embodies social protest. The play of carnival inverts the ordinary rules of social control; the rituals of the Corpus Christi dramas may ridicule authority.17 The decay of these rituals, or their outright termination, may signal a new phase of efforts to control the people. The reform of popular culture has, therefore, a class dimension. Control could be so total that "popular culture" became the creation of a ruling group. Two of the essays in this volume, those by Günther Lottes and Richard Trexler, trace the progress of such domination. In these two essays, as in several others, the history of popular culture is joined with the history of social structure. Too often this is not the case, and especially among the literary historians who otherwise have done so much to demarcate the "popular." But in heeding social structure, we cannot use it to distinguish what was popular from what was not. Culture lived more freely than any one-to-one relationship can recognize. Another difficulty is to tell when protest was mere "play" or when it was a real instrument of transformation. Lottes echoes Peter Burke and Natalie Davis in pointing out the "ambivalent potential" of ritual play. Carnival could at once be social protest and social control; elites may willingly allow such play in order to release tensions that could otherwise be threatening. Ritual may enforce and not disturb the boundaries of a social order. Davis has it both ways in her celebrated study of the charivari — which leaves us

12

David Hall

still uncertain as to the means of differentiating protest from control.18 The argument for understanding popular culture in relation to the "dominant" and "subordinate" classes has one other limitation. It may seem to preclude sharing, compromise, and interchange. I say "seem to," since any category implicitly contains its opposite and since historians like Ginzburg have been quick to say that they acknowledge interchange. But something is at issue here; almost all these essays comment on it in giving so much emphasis to interchange. Consider the examples, both here and in other studies. The bourgeois reader bought and read the same chap books and almanacs as did the menu peuple. Everyone attended carnival. Christianity of the late middle ages incorporated many compromises, as in the overlap between the prodigy and miracle. Apparitions, relics, and the like appealed to groups throughout society. Stories and motifs could descend from learned culture or move up. The Bible, once it had been translated into the vernacular, became a book for everyone. In an essay notable for its richness of description, Mary O'Neill shows how priests in 16th century Italy were caught in an ambivalent culture, partly learned, partly folkloric. It is instructive to read The Cheese and the Worms with this ambivalence in mind. Ginzburg seems to argue for the separation of elite belief and popular culture. Certainly he proposes (and here the context is in part the difficult task of authenticating folk belief) that there was an "autonomous oral tradition," a lore maintained among the peasants. But Menocchio, the miller whose unorthodox cosmogony got him into trouble with the Inquisition, was a reader of books, a circumstance that leads Ginzburg to acknowledge "a reciprocal influence between the culture of subordinate and ruling classes." Indeed, the story may be one of more indebtedness to elite culture than Ginzburg would prefer.19 Similarly, it is instructive to reflect on Peter Burke's Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe; for Burke, though less committed at the outset to the notion of dominant and subordinate classes, puts increasing emphasis on the role of intermediaries and even comes to argue that the culture of the carnival and chapbooks was common to all groups. In keeping with this argument, he construes the clergy (he is speaking of the friars in particular)

Introduction

13

as ambiguously "bicultural, men of the university as well as men of the market-place."20 This rethinking comes to something of a climax in Roger Chartier's remarks on "Culture as Appropriation," which represents the fourth and last direction taken by these essays. The cumulative weight of doubts and difficulties leads Chartier to propose a major change in how we conceive popular culture. Any theory that assigns cultural artifacts to some specific social level, labeling one pile "popular," and another "elite," collapses in the face of the evidence. For Chartier, the immediate evidence is the livrets bleus, the so-called "popular books" of the 17th and 18th centuries that historians of livre et societe have made famous. To regard these books as "of the people" is, he argues, a mistake. They circulated among the urban bourgeoisie before they reached the peasants; in effect they drew readers from most social classes. In content, the livrets bleus were a composite. Chartier finds in their intellectual confusion and eclecticism another reason for rejecting the assumption that popular culture inheres in certain "sets of text, gestures, and beliefs." Generalizing from these books, he argues that popular culture and popular religion embody a "cultural complexity" that we too often simplify or overlook. The livrets bleus comprise a "mixed corpus, containing elements of diverse origins." So too does popular religion, which "at the same time [is] both acculturated and acculturating." His conclusion is emphatic: "We must replace the study of cultural sets that were considered as socially pure with another point of view that recognizes each cultural form as a mixture, whose constituent elements meld together indissolubly." From this recognition flows the argument for "culture as appropriation." Since the meaning of "popular" does not automatically reside in certain texts and practices, the historian must turn to studying the uses (the patterns of consumption) that were made of artifacts or practices accessible to many. The act of reading will vary from one milieu to the next; and in these patterns lie the basis for a new history of popular culture. This is a history that makes much of sharing, compromise, and interchange. But it is also a history of ordinary people and their powers to adapt, trespass, and subvert whatever is directed at them. Chartier's is an important position. Our sources may not always permit a history of "appropriation," and some may still insist that

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David Hall

certain themes or practices were unequivocally popular. It may be, also, that books are singularly well served by this interpretation; few artifacts are so multiple in their signification or so dependent on the viewpoint of the user. Yet this is true of ritual as well, and Chartier's interpretation opens out into a history of popular religion as those meanings that the people gave to certain sacraments and celebrations.21 I shall close by reaffirming the elusiveness of popular culture. Its boundaries shift in response to many kinds of circumstances: the changing program of elites and their zeal to reform the people; the social context, be it one of villages or cities or the rise of central states; the economic context and the types of work; the strength or weakness of alternative traditions; the possibilities for compromise and play. It takes several axes of measurement to comprehend these multiple dimensions; no one theory, no one set of terms, will do. Let me therefore summarize the major possibilities, noting that we sometimes confront contradictions. First, culture is a repertory of languages. I mean not only the spoken and the written word, but the codes embedded in a thousand different practices - the naming of plants,22 the characterizations of madness, the rituals of the Church, the arrangements of space, the iconography applied to gravestones. Natalie Davis has spoken of her recognition that forms of associational life and collective behavior are cultural artifacts. . . . A journeymen's initiation rite, a village festive organization, an informal gathering of women for a lying-in or of men and women for story-telling, or a street disturbance could be "read" as fruitfully as a diary, a political tract, a sermon, or a body of laws.23

The historian of popular culture must ceaselessly expand upon this recognition. Codes lie buried in the most unassuming of phenomena; and in the search for them we need the help of many other disciplines: folklore, literary criticism, cultural anthropology, sociology, linguistics.24 Second, culture contains codes that "represent" society. Social order, whether real or hoped for, is revealed in witchcraft accusations, the nomenclature for bees,25 and rituals like the charivari. In decoding these languages, historians of popular culture work in creative tension with social historians, for they never assume that a one-to-one relationship exists between their codes and the structure of society.

Introduction

15

Third, the languages that comprise culture are very old, persisting less as formal systems than as decayed fragments. I do not mean to deny intellectual coherence to popular culture. But I am struck by the extraordinary tenacity of certain languages or myths, and by the mingling that occurs among them.26 Chapbooks are a case in point. Another is the world of "magic" that Keith Thomas has described. I want to reemphasize the point on which I quoted Thomas previously; everywhere we look, we find fragments of an older lore, and sometimes these are simply bits of decayed systems. The intellectual historian delights in recreating intellectual order. But the logic of popular culture is not so neat and tidy. How could it be, when things are so pell-mell? It is not easy to reconcile the tenacity of these codes with their role in "representing" social structure. Both are true, though contradictory. Fourth, the languages that make up culture are always in motion. They invade books and go wherever books are carried; they circulate as stories handed down for generations; they disappear down some back road, then suddenly return to the main highway - I think here of prophecy and visions of the coming kingdom.27 To map these routes is an exacting task, for we really do not know how culture is communicated or where it runs into firm boundaries. Do some codes circulate among the people but not elsewhere? At issue here is the purity of folklore, of oral tradition, and even, for that matter, of "learned" culture. Again we face a contradiction: languages, like water, seem to seep through every barrier, yet still we want to emphasize their separation and autonomy. Fifth, it is always in the interest of some group to place limits on the range of languages, to set up fences, guards, and priests who control sacred symbols. The history of popular culture becomes, of necessity, a history of all such efforts to control or reform the culture of the people. Sometimes, as with the rise of Methodism, a new style or language escapes from its creators and becomes a language of the people. Yet we must also recognize that reform movements often failed; reform is not, therefore, identical with domination. The groups so often charged with seeking domination, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, the learned, often faced in two directions, like the priests described by O'Neill.

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David Hall

We must not simplify their own confusion, as if they knew exactly how to line up culture and society. Sixth, languages are playful. To the structuralist, the Freudian, the symbolist, the student of folklore and mythology, culture is protean. Historians of popular culture may not agree with any of the theories that lead up to this conclusion, but their subject matter forces them to recognize a "logic of ambivalence" in much of their materials. Money, sex, medicine, ritual, proverbs, prophecy, how marvelously ambivalent these all turn out to be, and how interlaced with one another! Let us leave to learned culture, and to its historians, a clarity of meaning and a crisp set of boundaries, enforced through categories such as "Calvinism" and "The Enlightenment." For us there is the play of culture, the priest who heals by using "superstitious" remedies, the carnival and its inversions, the almanac with its predictions (themselves a form of play), and the "man of signs" descended from astrology. Meanings are prolific. But let this not discourage. Culture, as a saying goes, is what your butcher would have if he were your surgeon. United in opposing such sharp distinctions, united in their sympathy for those who in the past were people without history, the historians of popular culture whose essays follow are equally united in their recognition of compromise, fluidity, and interchange, and from this recognition draw their several versions of the past. I am grateful to Steven Kaplan for his advice and criticism.

NOTES 1. The phrase is Peter Burke's, in Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: 1978), chap. 3. 2. Arnaldo Momigliano, "Popular Religious Belief and the Late Roman Historians," in G. J. Cuming and Derek Baker, eds., Popular Belief and Practice, Studies in Church History, VIII (Cambridge: 1972), p. 8. 3. Richard Dorson, The British Folklorists (London: 1968), p. 12. 4. The English situation is described in John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England (London: 1976), and in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: 1971). 5. David Vincent, "The Decline of the Oral Tradition," in Robert Storch, ed., Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: 1982).

Introduction

17

6. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, p. 9. 7. M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (Cambridge, Mass.: 1979), pp. 177-82. 8. Jean-Claude Schmitt, "Les traditions folkloriques dans la culture medievale," Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 52 (1981), pp. 5-20; Natalie Z. Davis, "Some Themes and Tasks in the Study of Popular Religion," in Charles Trinkaus with Heiko A. Oberman, eds., The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, X (Leiden: 1974), pp. 307-10, 336. 9. Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, 6 vols. (Bloomington, Ind.: 1955). 10. C. Grant Loomis, White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend (Cambridge, Mass.: 1948). Criticism of Loomis is noted in Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300-1500 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1976), p. 154. 11. Cf. Valerio Valieri's review of The Cheese and the Worms in Journal of Modern History 54 (1982), pp. 139-43. 12. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (London: 1983), pp. 76-77. The initial quotation is Wordsworth, as cited in Thomas. 13. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, chap. 3; Robert S. Thomson, "The Development of the Broadside Ballad Trade and Its Influence upon the Transmission of English Folksongs" (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge, 1974), a citation I owe to David Vincent. 14. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Harmondsworth, U.K.: 1982), p. xiii. 15. Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif.: 1975), p. 122. 16. Davis, "Some Themes and Tasks," pp. 308, 313. 17. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, chap. 4; Mervyn James, "Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town," Past and Present 98 (1983), pp. 3-29. 18. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, pp. 199—204. 19. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, pp. 154-55. 20. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, p. 70. 21. John Bossy, "Blood and Baptism: Kinship, Community, and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries," in Derek Baker, ed., Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World, Studies in Church History, X (Oxford: 1973), pp. 129-44. 22. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. 72ff. 23. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modem France, pp. xvi-xvii. 24. "Language" may seem too ideal, too remote from "behavior," as a term to encompass all that must pass as popular culture. But I want to insist that language is merely a word for patterned meanings, and these meanings may be found - are found — in the chests carved by folk artisans, in ritual play; in short, in every sort of behavior and material artifacts. 25. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 62. 26. Demonstrations of this point include R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of

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Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge: 1981), especially pp. 126ff. 27. J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 17801850 (London: 1979).

The Learned and Popular Dimensions of Journeys in the Otherworld in the Middle Ages

JACQUES LE GOFF

For the past twenty years or so, historians of European culture from antiquity to the Industrial Revolution (from the 4th to the 19th centuries) have interested themselves in what they call "popular" culture. They have oscillated between two methods of interpreting the corpus they happen to be considering, whether it be made up of texts, rituals, or gestures.1 One method emphasizes the cultural object by demanding that the corpus itself explicate the nature and meaning of its culture, whether through structural analysis or content analysis, or both simultaneously. Since a culture almost never makes itself known in a raw or pure form, this attitude to cultural objects precipitates a hierarchically organized opposition between "learned" culture and "popular" culture, "high" culture and "popular" culture, "dominant" culture and "dominated" culture, the culture of the "elite" and that of "subordinate classes" or "subcultures," and so on. The second method of interpretation, meanwhile, concentrates on the actors, seeking its definition of what was popular in attitudes vis-a-vis cultural objects, in the way cultural products were consumed in a given period and by a particular group of actors. It is appropriate and even easy to criticize the first model when its exponents start out by postulating the existence of a "popular" culture for which proof remains to be given. But their method does furnish solid points of departure in two systems of

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reference whose empirical value is beyond question. The first such system is that of "genres" of "texts," texts that may be written, oral, or composed of physical gestures.2 Despite their unavoidably uncertain boundaries, the fabliau, the vision, the exemplum, the tale, the song, the oath, the carnival, the charivari, the so tie, all provide safe bases for analysis. The second system is that which folklorists have been working on since the 19th century. They have compiled inventories that, despite some questionable classifications, permit us to identify in more or less "objective" fashion the materials on which we can base an analysis of the "popular."3 Two obvious examples are The Types of the Folktale by Aarne and Thompson, and Stith Thompson's MotifIndex of Folk-Literature.4 However, this second strategy seems to present at least two sets of serious difficulties. The first concerns the near-impossibility of transferring to the study of the past those methods of observation, interrogation, and quantification that sociologists of contemporary society use. How does one identify the "social groups" whose behavior one wants to study? The second derives from the fundamentally questionable character of the conceptual tools involved. Is it not dangerous to isolate the "channels of reproduction, reception, and communication" from the conditions that produce cultural objects?5 It is the entire process that is important; even though the social milieux of production are in general easier to locate and define, those of consumption also demand investigation. The division of society into categories of analysis is a delicate matter in the case of contemporary societies; in the case of the societies of the past, the anachronistic transfer of modern concepts — especially that of class structure — and the confusion of the conceptual classifications of past actor and modern analyst set innumerable traps for the unwary.6 I note without completely endorsing the critical views of Pierre Bourdieu. "There are those who believe in the existence of a 'popular' culture," he writes. "The very phrase is an alliance of words through which one imposes, like it or not, the dominant definition of a culture. Such observers must not expect to find any more than scattered fragments of some more or less ancient learned culture (such as medical knowledge). These fragments are obviously selected and reinterpreted according to the fundamental principles of the class habitus, and are integrated into

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the holistic vision of the world it engenders. Observers must not expect to find the 'counter-culture' to which they refer, for no culture is deliberately erected to oppose the dominant culture, or consciously held as a counter-code or as a way of professing a separate way of life."7 If this criticism is appropriate, it applies especially to the working-class culture to which Bourdieu refers. It is quite obvious that the expression "popular culture" is related to "the dominant definition of culture," as is the term "superstitious" — indeed, that last term is even more deeply marked by the ideological imprint of learned culture. Yet the very historical context that shapes us, and from which we have not yet extricated ourselves, obliges us to begin with this vocabulary. Though it may be true that "popular culture" carries the burden of numerous "scattered fragments of learned culture," it cannot be reduced to a mere inventory of these shards. I stress that popular culture manifests its originality in what it does with the fragments concerned. If "learned" culture manipulates "popular" culture, then "popular" culture picks and chooses from "learned" culture at will. Thus what the historian attempts to identify, and what he or she actually identifies, is not simply some "counter-culture." Rather, it is a different kind of culture, which often stems from historical situations where defense against "learned" culture was in many ways essential. If I had an epistemological principle to offer, it would be the specificity of the historical context. But to approach the "popular" by studying cultural channels has one great advantage: it captures the history of the culture as it moves and changes, as it functions. In so doing we discover history. To oppose the two cultures one against the other tends to reduce "popular" culture to one that "superior" culture essentially dominates, manipulates, and uses. From this perspective learned culture destroys, deforms, or obliterates popular culture. It shapes popular culture from above whether "above" is the church, the aristocracy, or, later, the bourgeoisie. Under these circumstances the historian can only recover popular culture when it has been esthetically tamed, when it retains merely "the beauty of the dead."8 The study of the cultural behavior of ordinary people, on the other hand, often reveals "a relationship of defiance and of

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defense regarding the dominant messages."9 It is certainly hard to come to terms with the existence, the true nature, and the significance of "popular" cultural behavior in past times — difficult for the 19th century, it is ever more arduous before the 16th century as history's silences progressively muffle our understanding. Nevertheless, if one can identify a domain of "popular" culture (mixed with and shaped by learned culture though it may be) it becomes possible to evaluate its role as a producer as well as a consumer of culture. In this article I attempt to merge the methods of the two approaches outlined above in order to define the interactions of learned and popular culture. My field is the global society of the Occident in the Middle Ages, my concentration a literary genre: medieval accounts of journeys in the otherworld.

1. THE GENRE AND THE CORPUS.

The corpus is made up of a selection of narrative accounts of journeys in the otherworld, from the 7th century to the early 14th century. This is the list: 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Vision of Barontus, a monk from the monastery of Longoretus (Saint Cyran, near Bourges), written shortly after the vision in 678 or 679 (MGH, Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, 5:377-94). Vision of Bonellus, a monk whose account was narrated by the Spanish abbot Valerius. Valerius died in the last decade of the 7th century (PL, 87, cols. 433-35). Vision of the monk of Wenloch (ca. 717), narrated by Saint Boniface (MGH Epistolae, 3:252-57). Visions of Saint Fursey and of the pious layman Drythelm, described by Bede in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum , completed in 731 (3:19 and 5:12). Vision of Wettinus, a monk who died at Reichenau in 824, written by the abbot Hetto (PL, 105, cols. 771-780, and MGH, Poetae latini aevi carolini, vol. 2). Vision of Charles the Fat, of the last decade of the 9th century. It was recorded by Hariulf, around 1100, in his Chronique de l'Abbaye de Saint-Riquier (ed. F. Lot, Paris:

Journeys in the Otherworld

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

23

1894, pp. 144-48); by William of Malmesbury in the 12th century in his De gestis regum Anglorum (ed. W. Stubbs, 1:112-16); and by Vincent of Beauvais in his Speculum in the 13th century. The vision of the Mother of Guibert of Nogent, in the De Vita Sua, at the beginning of the 12th century (ed. E. R. Labande, Paris: 1981, pp. 148-58). The vision of the monk of Monte Cassino, Alberic of Settefrati, written down around 1130 with the help of Peter the Deacon (ed. Mauro Inguanez, in Miscellanea Cassinese, 11 (1932), pp. 83-103). The Vision of Tnugdal, an Irish knight, related by a monastic writer in 1149.10 The Purgatorium Sancti Patricii, written down between 1180 and 1220 and probably closer to 1180, by an English Cistercian, H. of Saltrey.11 The Vision of Turchill (1206), probably the work of the Cistercian Ralph of Cogeshall. It was taken up again by the Benedictines of Saint Albans Roger of Wendover (died in 1236) in his Flores historiarum, and Matthew Paris (died in 1259) in his Chronica majora.12 La Divina Commedia by Dante (early 14th century).

In general terms, each of these accounts relates a vision. They belong, therefore, to a genre that thrived during the Middle Ages, especially in the monastic environment.13 Together, they constitute a particularly important variety of these visions: narrative accounts of journeys in the otherworld. These accounts develop from three traditions. The first is an antique tradition of tales of descent into the netherworld. The tradition is bounded on the one hand by tales of the judgment of an Egyptian hero by the King of the Underworld, Nergal, and especially the journeys through hell of Assyro-Babylonian heroes, Our-Nammou, prince of Our, and Enkidou in the Epic of Gilgamesh; and on the other hand by the famous descent of Eneas into Hades in the 6th book of Vergil's Aeneid.1* The second is accounts of journeys in the otherworld from the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic tradition, between the 2nd century B. C. and the 3rd century A. D. This tradition was extended by Greek and Latin versions of Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Arabic text.15 The third is "bar-

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barian" accounts — especially Celtic, and more particularly Irish — of journeys to the otherworld.16 The two latter traditions are not merely precedents for the medieval visions but are genuine sources for them. More accurately, the visions of the Middle Ages extend the traditions, often by blending the two types of sources; moreover, the third, "barbarian" tradition is known to us only through medieval versions, the anterior pagan or semipagan versions having belonged to an oral tradition. In most cases, the hero, who may be a monk or a layman (a great character as, in another vision, Charlemagne and, in our corpus, Charles the Fat; a knight like the Irishmen Tnugdal and Owen in Saint Patrick's Purgatory; or a peasant like Drythelm or Turchill), is transported during his sleep to the otherworld where he is guided by a saint (often Paul or Peter) or an angel (most often an archangel, Gabriel or Raphael). He visits first the premises of hell, where he is terrified by the cold and the heat, by dreadful mountains and valleys, by rivers of fire and lakes of molten metal populated by monsters, snakes, and dragons, and where he witnesses the awful torments inflicted by monstrous beasts and loathsome demons upon the dead (souls endowed with the appearance of a body sensitive to tortures). Then he experiences the places of paradise, where he admires fragrant, blossoming meadows, houses built with gold, silver, and precious stones, and troups of luminous deceased singing marvelous songs among angels shining with beauty. This image of the otherworld is comprised of several places, several "receptacles of souls," according to a more or less disordered configuration. The infernal part is often subdivided into an upper gehenna through which the visionary travels and a lower gehenna of which the traveler only sees the opening, the terrifying mouth of the pit. The paradisiac part is often divided into regions — sometimes separated by walls - progressively more luminous and fragrant. At the end of the 12th century, with the Purgatorium Sancti Patricii, the space of the otherworld becomes organized with an intermediary region between Hell and Paradise, the Purgatory from which the souls, purified by trial and torment, gain access to Paradise. I have completed this corpus with several texts of a somewhat different nature. Some that belong to the Celtic tradition remain close to the pre-Christian models that surface in them. They

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25

describe voyages in which the successive sojourns differ from those carried out in the Christian Hell and Paradise. Islands populated with supernatural beings, awesome or enchanting, with frightening or seductive wonders are separated by seas filled with monsters and ordeals. In this realm of the dead, nonetheless, joy and delight often outweigh fear or evil: the Voyage of Bran and the Navigation of Saint Brendan11 and, in particular, a vision of a journey to Paradise that I will discuss further on. I have also added to the corpus the first version of a theme that will become very successful at the end of the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, the Land of Cokaygne.18 Indeed, it also concerns a journey through an imaginary world filled with marvels, a world of plenty, of idleness - a world turned upside down. 2. THE SYSTEM OF INTERACTION BETWEEN THE LEARNED AND THE POPULAR.

The learned character of the texts making up this corpus is obvious. Their authors were clerics, their language is Latin, and most of them are crammed with bookish reminiscences and quotations drawn particularly from Judeo-Christian apocalyptic literature. Emerging from a monastic environment, they were at first destined for that specific setting. But they are also close to popular culture, as the presence of important elements of these texts in the catalogues and repertories of folklore demonstrates. Thus, the themes of these narrative accounts can be found in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, where the motif of "other world journeys" inaugurates the chapter on Marvels and covers its first two hundred entries: FO-F199. The essential characteristics and many secondary themes of our accounts correspond to themes recorded in the Motif-Index: F.I (journey to otherworld as dream or vision), F.5 (journey to otherworld as penance), F.7 (joumey to otherworld with angel), F.10 (journey to upper world). F.ll (journey to heaven - upper-world paradise), F.52 (ladder to upper world — this is the theme of Jacob's ladder), F.80 (journey to lower world), F.81 (descent to lower world of dead - Hell, Hades), F.92 (pit entrance to lower world), F.92.4 (entrance to lower world through mountain), F.93.0.2.1 (well entrance to

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lower world), F.95 (path to lower world), F.I01.4 (escape from lower world by magic), F.I02 (accidental arrival in lower world). Accounts such as the Voyage of Bran, the Navigation of Saint Brendan, or the Land of Cokaygne refer to other motifs of the Motif-Index: F.I 10 (journey to terrestrial otherworlds), F.I 11 (journey to earthly paradise), F.I 11.1 (journey to Isle of Laughter), F.I 16.1 (voyage to the Land of Youth), F.123 (journey to land of little men — pygmies). The localization of the other world (F.I30 location of otherworld) involves either categories of places defined by physical geography (F.131 otherworld in hollow mountain, F.I32.1 earthly paradise on mountain) or countries richly endowed with the geographic supernatural, such as Ireland (F.I30.3 Ancient Ireland as location of otherworld).19 Access to the otherworld (F.I50 access to otherworld) also reveals traits common to both the world of folklore and our medieval corpus: F. 150.1 (entrance to otherworld guarded by monsters or animals), F.I51.1 (perilous path to otherworld), and especially the theme of the bridge (F.I52 bridge to otherworld).20 The nature and the activities of the otherworld are divided, in folklore as well as in the medieval texts, between the vision of a universe filled with happiness and satiety (F.I 62.2.2 rivers of wine in otherworld, F. 162.2.3 rivers of honey in otherworld, F. 169.8 abundance in otherworld, F.I69.9 pleasant fragrance in otherworld,, F.I73 otherworld land of happiness, F.I73.1 otherworld land of pleasure) and that of a world filled with dread and ordeals (F.I71.2 broad and narrow road in otherworld, F.I71.6 mysterious punishments in otherworld). Finally — and we shall see the problems this raised for medieval authors of journeys to the beyond — the otherworld is a universe outside of time and removed from the reaches of death (F.I72. no time, no birth, no death in otherworld). One could find the same community of motifs regarding the journey to the otherworld in the case of demons (F.400-F.499 spirits and demons) and of fire (Motif-Index 6:286—89). Likewise, most of these medieval accounts resemble the taletypes in Aame and Thompson's classification. For example T. 301 The three stolen princesses includes a section (II) entitled a "descent into the lower world"; T. 460A and T. 461A are voyages to discover the secrets of the beyond (The journey to God to re-

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21

ceive reward; The journey to the deity for advice or repayment). The journey to the otherworld is at the heart of the tale of the two friends "in life and death," in which the survivor follows the one who died into the otherworld (T. 470 Friends in life and death). The bridge to the beyond is the object of T. 471 (The bridge to the other world). The Land of Cokaygne has become T. 1930 (Schlaraffenland - Land of Cokaygne). While these correspondences are interesting, what matters is to identify, analyze, and interpret the relationships between learned and popular culture in these accounts. Jean-Claude Schmitt has given an interesting schema of such relations in the matter of a journey to Paradise recently studied by the Italian ethnologist Giuseppe Gatto.21 It concerns a 13th century text that is doubtless the most ancient version of Aarne and Thompson's T. 470. A young lord invites a friend to his wedding, an old man (an angel) dressed in white and riding a white mule who, in return, invites him to a feast to take place three days after the young man's wedding. Passing through a narrow strait, the bridegroom reaches a vast plateau covered with flowers, with fruit trees stocked with innumerable birds, where his host and a following of youths all dressed in white greet him. After he has gone through three "abodes," they welcome him to a fourth where he knows an ineffable happiness that lasts three hundred years. This period of time seems to him to have lasted no longer than three hours or, at most, a day's length. But when he returns home, his castle has been turned into a monastery, his wife and his parents are long dead, and when the prince "who once had been lost" brings to his mouth a piece of bread, he becomes an old man and dies. Most extraordinary and highly interesting is that the anonymous author of this text, about whom we are told only that he is attached to a monastery in northern Italy, relates how he came to know this story. The cleric states precisely that he has only "written this story down," that he is not its "source" (fons ejus), but just the "channel" (canalis) by which it is transmitted. The one who had related it to him was an "illiteratus" who had not himself, "as the vulgar say, sucked it from his finger" (nee ipse, ut vulgo dicirur, ex suo digito suxit), that is, invented it; he had heard it from a "Htteratus" retaining only what was in the vernacular and forgetting what was said in the "other language," probably

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meaning in Latin (sed a literato remudiens mat erne lingue verba retinuit, alterius lingue vocabula retinere non potuit). The scribe judged the story worthy of being written down but, all the while denying having altered anything in it, he is describing the double process of Christianization and of learned formalization to which he has submitted this folkloric account: "I have added to it nothing more than what writers are allowed to do; if I have ordered the events into sequences, if I have aptly mixed old things with new ones, if I have added the wood of Moses, the salt of Elisha, and finally the wine of Christ made from water, I have done so not to deceive but to enhance the elegance of the account."22 This admission concerning sources allows us to identify a schema of transmission in four phases. The first three phases remain in the oral realm, whereas the fourth passes into a written relation. First, there is the oral folk tradition, then a "litteratus" a learned cleric, then an "illiterates" and, finally, a "writer," an anonymous "scriptor" of the second half of the 13th century. We do not know how the man of "popular" culture altered the learned cleric's account, except that he did not retain that which in the story was probably said in Latin. Concerning the scholarly scribe's transformation of the "illiteratus" account, we know it consists of a "literary" and "logical" formalization, a "modernization," and a "Christianization." Regarding the last point, one can identify three probable modifications: the transformation of the psychopomp old man into an angel, the assimilation of the otherworld to the place where "reside Enoch and Elijah," that is, the earthly Paradise, and the conversion of the hero's castle into a monastery. Two remarks seem in order. First, one suspects that a sizable part of the process described in this text must be applicable to several of the visions belonging to our corpus. Indeed, we are told that the visionary monk related his vision and that it was up to a learned cleric, often the monastery's abbot, to set it down in writing, either dictating it or writing it out himself. From a more or less "illiterate" monk, representing "popular" culture, the account of the journey passed, through the mediation of the "scholarly" writer, to the world of learned culture. We possess a few details of this transition in the case of one of the strangest visions, that of Alberic of Settefrati. Alberic, born around 1100,

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experienced his vision during an illness when he was ten years of age (he is thus twice "illiterate": he belongs to the simple folk and he is a child). Having entered the monastery of Monte Cassino during the tenure of abbot Gerard (1111-1123), he related his vision to a monk named Guido who transcribed it. But in being passed from hand to hand and from mouth to ear, his account was altered and abbot Senioretto (1127-1137) advised Alberic to rewrite it (that is, to dictate it again) with the help of Peter the Deacon. It is this last version that survives. Here it is clear how the account of a half-educated monk has reached us through several rearrangements, all marked with the learned clerical stamp but borrowing both oral and written forms of transmission. Indeed, one must not forget, regarding this complex process of acculturation during medieval times, that the cultural history of the period was seldom that of a clearcut opposition between popular and learned or between oral and written (these two oppositions are not, of course, one and the same thing). Rather, it took the form of interactions between more or less learned and more or less popular cultural acts and actors.23 The second remark concerns the "space" of this acculturation. The tavern and, in particular, the public square have been cited as places of social and cultural exchange during the Middle Ages.24 One should also stress the role played by monasteries. The intercourse between the "educated" monks and the "uneducated" members of the monastic familia, including the equally "rustic" guests of the monastery, as well as the relationships between the monastic "elite" who belonged socially and culturally to the dominant strata of society (and exercised authority in the monastic setting) and "simple," semiliterate monks, must have provided an exceptionally favorable breeding-ground for these forms of acculturation. I must stress how difficult it is to establish, for these remote periods, the ways in which the folklorization of learned culture took place (contrary to the case at the end of the Middle Ages, when some "popular" works of art facilitate the study of acceptances of, resistance to, and adaptations toward the "learned" models). One can only formulate a few hypotheses. First, let us try to reconstruct, backwards, the text of the 13th century vision of paradise mentioned earlier. It can be safely assumed, for instance, that the psychopomp old man designated

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as an angel belongs to folk culture, since angels are generally presented as "ageless" beings but of a "youthful" countenance. One cannot forget, however, the tendency of the monastic environment to assimilate the image of the monk and especially the hermit to that of the angel; the stereotype of the monk is, rather, that of an old man. This decoding of a cultural palimpsest must, therefore, be performed prudently. Second, taking up more recent examples (Carlo Ginzburg's miller Menocchio, the novels of the Bibliotheque bleue), Roger Chartier has identified the operation of agents of "popular" culture that I believe are present in the filigree of my medieval narratives of journeys in the otherworld: "the segmentation of the text into autonomous units that stand meaningfully by themselves, the decentering of motives, the radicalization of significations, the analogical treatment of fragments which would have been deemed unrelated from a more learned point of view, the literal reading of metaphors,"25 and, furthermore, "the repetitions and recalls, the organization [of the text] according to a restricted number of narrative schemes, the constant revamping of a text that is never settled."26 Nevertheless, one should not assume the existence of a "popular" reading and a "learned" reading, both unchangeable or almost so, throughout history. From the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the cultural habits of the various sociocultural categories kept changing and, above all, their interrelationships kept modifying themselves. As propounded by Keith Thomas, the most enduring characteristic of the Middle Ages is a certain "common mentality" in the domain of culture as well as of religion.27 This set of common cultural and mental attitudes was shared by both the "literate" and the "illiterate," notwithstanding the difference - actually q-uite important - between the bilingual clerics, who were conversant in both Latin and the vernacular, and the monolingual "common people." Third, Piero Camporesi has eloquently insisted that "the culture of poverty (and thus almost the entirety of folk-culture) can only represent the world under the form its epistemological apparatus made available to it" and that its "cognitive statutes" are different from those of the intellectual elites "even though the areas of contamination, the suggestions, the interferences between the two cultures can be manifold."28 Thus, if "the image of the world elaborated by the popular mental representations of the prein-

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dustrial epoch differs from the classical model utilized by the clerics and the scholars," the same is true for the image of the otherworld.29 Camporesi mentions "the popular optic of the distorted, the inordinate, the hyperbolic (or the miniature), the monstrous, the excessive, the amorphous," an optic in which "the chaotic prevails over a rational design that presupposes a center . . . where the relationships between time and space can reverse themselves." Time after time one finds "the compensatory dream projected by the popular Utopia conquering an ever-increasing territory from which superior rationality is banned."30 Camporesi rightly insists on the specificity of this "oneiric universe." I would emphasize that, even though the dream had become by the Middle Ages a topos backed by a long learned tradition, recourse to the dream or the vision opens wide the gates to the flood of the popular imagination. Monastic phantasms are situated at the crossroads of this popular oneirism and the visionary apocalyptic tradition. Dreams, which can hardly be controlled by the Church, unfold freely in the imaginary universe of the beyond.31 One recognizes in them the compensatory imagination so violently expressed during the Middle Ages (abundancy and sloth as in the Land of Cokaygne, ardent sexual phantasms especially in the Vision of Wettinus, the breaking loose of the marvelous as opposed to the miraculous). What is easier to grasp is how learned culture tends to manipulate folklore, that is, the objects of popular culture. Its action can be briefly characterized in regard to otherworld journeys (provided one can actually discern the "popular" datum under its learned or half-learned disguise). The essential process is that of Christianization. It manifests itself primarily by substituting Christian motifs for pagan elements and conceptions. Though psychopomp beasts are sometimes retained, the guides and the auxiliaries of the journeying hero are transformed into saints and angels. The object or the gesture or the magical word that grants safekeeping in the course of the journey is specifically Christian (the sign of the cross, the name of Jesus). Above all, the places of the beyond have become Christian spaces and the "receptacles" of souls are reduced to three in number: Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory. Occasionally a fourth is added, the Earthly Paradise, and sometimes a fifth or sixth

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with the limbos (the limbo of the unbaptized, the limbo of the patriarchs). More importantly, a profound transformation is performed, even more upon fundamental structures than on contents. It affects the spatial and temporal framework, the nature of the beyond, and the style of the narrative. The space of the otherworld is organized and rationalized. The multiplicity of traditional sites, the variety of the "receptacles," their more or less anarchic succession in the course of a rather erratic itinerary (still very much in evidence in the confused structure that the otherworld possesses in the Vision of Tnugdal, of the middle of the 12th century), give way to a space divided into the three major areas: Hell and Paradise, plus an intermediate site, Purgatory, each in turn subdivided according to a scholastic partitioning that culminates in the circles and cornices of the Divine Comedy. This effort at organizing the space of the otherworld is notable for being exerted at the boundaries: in Saint Patrick's Purgatory, in which the intermediate site is in the process of being constructed, the successive fields through which the traveler in the otherworld passes lack visible limits, extending beyond sight. Even more fundamentally, it is the very process of the spatialization of the otherworld, specifically that of Purgatory, which incarnates a spiritual transformation (a purification rather than a situational state), that is worrisome to the learned culture and to ecclesiastical orthodoxy. From Augustine through Thomas Aquinas to the fathers of the Council of Trent, the learned circles of theologians do their best to keep in check this "popular" need to spatialize spiritual life and to localize beliefs. This effort on the part of learned culture is oriented toward the elimination of the ambiguity or rather the ambivalence characteristic of "popular" culture. As Schmitt correctly noted, scholastic theology refuses to recognize a beyond that would be Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell all at once. The bipartite Hell, consisting of a superior gehenna from which one could ascend and an inferior gehenna into which one could fall forever, and the Celtic otherworld of King Arthur, a composite of exquisite pleasures and trying ordeals, are replaced by eternal sites — Hell and Paradise — separated until Judgment Day by Purgatory, the antechamber to Paradise.

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Learned labor to transform the notion of time is particularly intense and significant. Time spent in Purgatory is divided into an objective and a subjective temporality. Objective time can be measured, segmented, manipulated in the fashion of the time that rules the earth; it is a time largely dependent, according to Euclidean principles of "proportionality," on the quantity and the quality of the sins of the deceased, and on the supplications of the survivors. Subjective time is popular time in reverse. Whereas the folkloric traveler experiences a very short period of time in the otherworld, the guest of Purgatory imagines having endured a period of time ten or one hundred times longer.32 The difficulty encountered by the clerics of Christianity in allowing an intermediary otherworld, for logical as well as ideological reasons, led the Church to a quasi-identification between Hell and Purgatory, to an "infernalization" of Purgatory (as Arturo Graf showed long ago).33 Finally, one must not omit the basic manipulation exerted by the style of the learned report upon the radically different esthetic of the folk narrative. The author of the vision examined by Gatto declared that he wished only "to enhance the elegance of the account." But this concern for form on the part of the learned clerics is more than a mere esthetic fancy, more than purely a matter of "literary" taste. It profoundly marks the passage from one world of sensibility and culture to another. One notices the learned writer, such as the editor of the vision of Turchill who confers on his otherworld the aspect of a stage-set and transforms his travelers into spectators at the theatre.34 One may wonder whether this is not at one and the same time a radical rationalization of popular space and an advanced effort to domesticate the narrative ramblings of the folkloric account by way of theatrical confinement.

3. OUTLINE OF A SOCIOCULTURAL HISTORY OF JOURNEYS IN THE OTHERWORLD DURING THE MIDDLE AGES.

I shall only sketch a periodization of journeys in the otherworld; a complete periodization would be grounded in a systematic inventory and analysis of all existing texts. As a working hypothesis, the four periods may be characterized in these terms.

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Jacques Le Goff

1. Before the 7th century, the Church's determination to destroy or occlude folkloric culture, which it assimilated under the label of paganism, has practically wiped out all accounts of journeys to the beyond. A few shreds of the otherworld find their way into certain Dialogues of Gregory the Great. 2. The 7th to the 10th centuries are the great era of visions of the beyond. It corresponds to the rapid growth of monasticism and to monastic culture's filtering of resurgent popular elements. 3. During the 11th and 12th centuries, especially during the latter, folklore spreads the visions widely. This is connected with an improved status for the laity. 4. Learned culture's counter-attack unfolds on two levels at once: it rationalizes the beyond and it infernalizes the subterranean otherworld. Translated by Victor Aboulaffia

NOTES The three main theoretical texts are Peter Burke, "Oblique Approaches to the History of Popular Culture," in C. Bigsby, ed., Approaches to Popular Culture (London: 1976), pp. 69-84; Roger Chartier, "La culture populaire en question," inH. Histoire no. 8 (1981), pp. 85-96; and Jean-Claude Schmitt, "Les traditions folkloriques dans la culture medievale: Quelques reflexions de methode," in Archives des Sciences Sociales de Religions no. 52/1 (1981), pp. 5—20. The essential bibliography on the topic can be found in these articles, particularly in Schmitt's. I recognize that one can criticize with cause the notion of genre or of literary form. For instance, the use made of Andre Jolles's 1929 work, Einfache Formen: Legende I Sage/My the l Rätsel l Spruch l Kasus /Memorabile/Märchen/Witz (Darmstadt: 1958), has been disappointing. The blame, however, does not lie in the historically defined forms studied by Jolles, but in the weakness of his use of the concept of "simplicity." One can criticize specifically the notions of tale-type, of motif, of Proppian function, without denying the value of the works of A. Aarne, Stith Thompson, and V. Propp as reference tools. A. Aarne, Verzeichnis der Märchentypen (1920, 1928), translated and revised by Stith Thompson (1961, 1964, FFC no. 184). The use of the Index exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales, by F. C. Tubach (FFC no. 204, Helsinki: 1969), is a more delicate matter, given

Journeys in the Otherworld

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

35

the shortcomings of the work (cf. Cl. Bremond, J. Le Goff, and J.-C1. Schmitt, "L'exemplum," in Typologie des sources du moyen-age occidental [Turnhout: 1982]). Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of FolkLiterature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables and Local Legends, 6 vols. (Copenhagen: 1955 — 1958). H. R. Jauss, quoted by Jean Starobinski in his preface to a collection of articles by Jauss, published in French under the title Pour une esthetique de la reception (Paris: 1978). On the aporias of naive sociological methods applied to the fabliaux, see M. Th. Lorcin, Faxons de sentir et de penser: Le s fabliaux fran$ais (Paris: 1979). However, the sociological perspectives on medieval literature of Erich Kohler remain very suggestive; see especially his "Observations historiques et sociologiques sur la poesie des troubadours," Cahiers de civilisation medievale, 1964, pp. 27-51. Bourdieu, La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: 1979), p. 459. See the brilliant essay by M. de Certeau, D. Julia, and J. Revel, "La beaute du mort: le concept de culture populaire," Politique aujourd'hui (12/1970), pp. 3-23. These expressions belong to Chartier, "La culture populaire," p. 94, addressing the sociologist Richard Hoggart's La culture du pauvre: Etude sur la style de vie des classes populaires en Angleterre (Paris: 1970). It concerns England in the 1950s. Visio Tnugdali, ed. A. Wagner (Erlangen: 1882). There are many medieval translations into vernaculars, including Icelandic, Russian, and SerboCroatian. Cf. Nigel Palmer, The German and Dutch Translations of the "Visio Tundali" (Munich: 1975). For the editions of the Purgatorium Sancti Patricii, cf. J. Le Goff, La naissance du Purgatoire, p. 259, n. l. Visio Thurkilli, ed. P. G. Schmidt, Bibliotheca Teubneriana (Leipzig: 1978). "Chronica Rogen de Wendover," in Flores Historiarum (London: 1887), 2:16-35; and Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora (London, 1874), 2:497-511. On the topic of medieval visions, cf. P. Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: 1981), and, by the same author, "Die Visionen des Mittelalters, Ein geschichtlicher Umriss," Zeitschrift fur Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 30 (1978), pp. 116-28, and "Klassen und Hierarchien im Jenseits in Soziale Ordnungen im Selbstverstandnis des Mittelalters," in Miscellanea Mediaevalia 12/1 (Berlin and New York: 1979), pp. 20-40. Also, C. J. Holdsworth, "Visions and Visionaries in the Middle Ages," in History no. 48 (1963), pp. 141-53; M. Aubrun, "Caractere et portee religieuse et sociale des 'Visiones' en Occident du VIe au XIe siegle," Cahiers de Civilisation Mediavale (1980), pp. 109—30. Claude Carozzi is preparing a thesis on the visions of the early Middle Ages; see the overview in "La geographic de l'au-dela et sä signification pendant le haut Moyen-Age," in Popoli e paesi nella cultura altomedievale, XXIX Settimana del Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto Medioevo (Spoleto: 4/1981, in press).

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14. J. Kroll, Gott und Hall: Der Mythos vom Descensus Kampfe (Leipzig and Berlin: 1932); F. Bar, Les routes de l'autre-monde: descente aux enfers et voyages dans l'au-dela (Paris: 1946). 15. H. H. Rowley, The Relevance of Apocalyptic: A Study of Jewish and Christian Apocalypses from Daniel to the Revelation (New York: 1963). The apocalyptic vision that had the greatest influence on medieval visions is the Apocalypse of Paul. Consult particularly Th. Silverstein, Visio sancti Pauli: The History of the Apocalypse in Latin, Together with Nine Texts (London: 1935). 16. H. R. Patch, The Other World, According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: 1950), and John D. Seymour,Irish Visions of the Other World (London: 1930). 17. Kuno Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, to the Land of the Living: An Old Irish Saga (London: 1895), with an appendix including Alfred Nutt, The Happy Otherworld in the My thico-romantic Literature of the Irish: The Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth. See also Antonietta Grignani, Navigatio Sancti Brendani, La navigazione di San Brandano (Milan: 1975). 18. Le fabliau de Cocagne, of the middle of the 13th century, was edited by V. Väänänen in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, bulletin of the Neophilological Society of Helsinki (1947), pp. 20-32; and reprinted with an Italian translation in Gian Carlo Belle, ed., Fabliaux: Racconti comici medievali (Ivrea: 1982), pp. 94-105. Cf. G. Cocchiara, H paese di Cuccagna e altri studi di folclore (Turin, 1980), and // mundo a rovescia (Turin: 1963); C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London: 1972); J. Delumeau, La mart des Pays de Cocagne (Paris: 1976); R. Chartier and D. Julia, "Le monde a 1'envers," L'Arc no. 65 (1976), pp. 43-53. 19. Sicily should be added since it refers to F.131 (otherworld in hollow mountain). Cf. Le Goff, La naissance du Purgatoire, chap. 6: "Le Purgatoire entre la Sicile et l'Irlande," pp. 241-81. 20. P. Dinzelbacher, "Die Jenseitsbrücke im Mittelalter," Diss., Universität Wien, 104 (Vienna: 1973). 21. Schmitt, Les traditions folkloriques, pp. 11 — 14; G. Gatto, "Le voyage au paradis: la christianisation des traditions folkloriques au Moyen Age," Annales E. S. C. (1979), pp. 929-42. The 13th century text was published by J. Schwarzer, "Visionslegende," Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 13 (1882), pp. 338-51. 22. Schmitt, Les traditions folkloriques, pp. 12—13. 23. Cf. Franz H. Bäuml, "Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and illiteracy," Speculum (1980), pp. 237-65. On yet another cultural intermediary, the curate, cf. L. Allegra, "II parocco: un mediatore fra alta e bassa cultura in Storia d'ltalia," Annali 4. Intellettuali e potere (Turin: 1981), pp. 897-947. Allegra starts with the 16th century. 24. I am thinking specifically of Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass.: 1968). 25. Chartier, "La culture populaire," p. 92. 26. Ibid., p. 93.

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37

27. K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: 1971). 28. P. Camporesi, // pane selvaggio (Bologna: 1980); in French, La pain sauvage: L'imaginaire de la faim de la Renaissance au XVIII6 siecle (Paris: 1981), p. 87. 29. Ibid., p. 87. 30. Ibid., p. 88. On medieval Utopias, see F. Graus, "Social Utopias in the Middle Ages," Past and Present 38 (1967), pp. 3-19. 31. J. Le Goff, "Les re"ves dans la culture et la psychologic collective de 1'Occident medieval," Scolies 1 (1971), pp. 123-30, reprinted in Pour un autre Moyen Age (Paris: 1977), pp. 299-306. Also consult V. Lanternari, "Sogno-Visione," Enciclopedia Einaudi 13 (Turin: 1981), pp. 94-126. 32. J.-C1. Schmitt's talk on this theme at the CNRS colloquium on "Christian Time, 3rd-13th Centuries," is to be published. 33. A. Graf, "Artü nell'Etna," in Leggende, miti e superstizioni del Medio Evo (Turin: 1925). 34. Henri Rey-Flaud, Pour une dramaturgic du Moyen Age (Paris: 1980), pp. 82—83, has compared the Vision of Thurchill to the theatre of the beginning of the 13th century, specifically relating it to the/eu de Saint Nicolas of Jean Bodel of Arras.

The Witches' Sabbat: Popular Cult or Inquisitorial Stereotype?

CARLO GINZBURG

In the last fifteen years the study of witchcraft has become a flourishing academic industry. However, we still know much more about the attitudes of the judges and the patterns of persecution in different parts of Europe than we know about witches and witchcraft. The ideological bias that underlies this choice has occasionally been betrayed, as in Hugh Trevor-Roper's contemptuous remarks about "the mental rubbish of peasant credulity and feminine hysteria."1 More often it has remained implicit. Nevertheless, it must be said that the reconstruction of popular notions of witchcraft, beyond the learned stereotypes described by demonologists and imposed by judges (lay and clerical) through physical and psychological pressure, is a difficult task. It is not always easy to say where methodological difficulties end and criteria of ideologically determined relevance take over. In the particular case of the witches' sabbat the distinction seems justified. Margaret Murray suggested sixty years ago that the witches' sabbats were gatherings of people who performed rituals connected to a pre-Christian fertility cult;2 nowadays serious historians reject this interpretation. Norman Conn's book Europe's Inner Demons (1975) authoritatively states the new orthodoxy: the sabbat was the last revival of an ancient negative stereotype that had been projected serially on Jews, early Christians, and medieval heretics. All these sects or groups had been

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accused of meeting in secret places, mostly during the night, to perform sexual orgies (including incest) and ritual anthropophagy. Inquisitors and demonologists concocted an image of the sabbat that was, from this perspective, only the last link of a chain that started at the very beginning of the Christian era. But does this mean that the witches' sabbat was totally foreign to popular culture? Murray's interpretation of all witches' confessions about the sabbat as descriptions of physical events was certainly absurd — and based on a misreading of the evidence. (For instance, as Cohn has conclusively shown, Murray as she quoted from witches' confessions systematically suppressed all references to nocturnal flights and metamorphoses into animals, incidents that would have made her interpretation rather puzzling.)3 Ignoring the problem of the physical reality of the witches' sabbat, I shall limit myself to a discussion of its cultural meaning. In other words, I shall try to explore not the ritual but the mythical dimension of the sabbat image. Maybe the ritual existed only in the inquisitors' minds; but even if that were the case it would be wrong to conclude that the whole sabbat myth was a learned artifact. A confusion of these two levels - mythical and ritual — has prevented a full discussion of the witches' sabbat, insofar as historians have been satisfied with the mere refutation of the so-called "Murray thesis." I think, on the contrary, that many questions about the witches' sabbat are still to be asked even if we provisionally agree that a full-fledged sect of witches never existed. In a forthcoming book I shall try to show that the witches' sabbat was neither a learned myth (as Cohn argued) nor a popular myth, but a compromise formation — a cultural, not a psychological, compromise. We can distinguish in the sabbat stereotype elements coming from above and elements coming from below. The emergence of this compromise forms a good example of the interrelations between learned and popular culture in preindustrial Europe. Everyone knows what the sabbat stereotype was. It would be possible to inventory its elements: ointments, metamorphosis into animals, nocturnal flights, gatherings in faraway places, sexual orgies, banquets, homage to the Devil, debasement of the Cross, and so on. It would also be possible to try to reconstruct the cultural origin of each element, but such an approach

Popular Cult or Inquisitorial Stereotype?

41

would be too abstract. After all, the sabbat myth was not a sudden invention but the coherent result of a slow process. The real problem is to reconstruct how the fusion of the stereotype's various elements became possible. I shall analyze first the inquisitorial image of the sabbat. Conn's argument that it came from a very old tradition is too internalist and, in fact, begs several questions. First, his stereotype's historical coherence is only apparent: it implies a wide chronological gap and a discontinuity in its content. In the matter of chronology, between the accusations charging the early Christians with performing sexual orgies and ritual anthropophagy and the same accusations against the medieval heretical sects, many centuries passed during which the stereotype was silent. The only exception appears in a sermon against the sect of the Paulicians written by the head of the Armenian church, John of Ojun, at the beginning of the 8th century.4 Much later, it was echoed in the dialogue On the Operations of the Demons, until very recently ascribed to the Byzantine writer Michael Psellos, where the standard accusation is leveled against the Thrakian Bogomiles.5 The passage is especially important because it included an element that would become part of the Western stereotype - almost the same words were used against various heretical sects, including the Cathars. Those heretics were still accused of practicing anthropophagy; but they were now said to eat the ashes of babies born from sexual intercourse, often of an incestuous nature, that the sect performed in their nocturnal gatherings.6 The stereotype was certainly negative, but not aggressive. Medieval heretics were represented as dreadful people, secluded from society, ignoring the basic laws of human life — practicing incest, devouring their own babies — but not, as witches would later be, a physical threat to society as a whole. I do not deny, of course, that certain elements of the sabbat stereotype had previously been imputed to heretics: above all, the homage to the Devil, the abjuration of the Christian faith, and the debasement of the Cross. In order to understand the emergence of the notion of an all-powerful sect of witches threatening society, however, we have to look elsewhere. My evidence, therefore, will differ from Cohn's. I shall start with the famous lepers' conspiracy discovered in France in 1321.7

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A rumor suddenly spread in various parts of France that the lepers had attempted to poison wells, fountains, and rivers. Incensed groups of people tried to burn lepers alive. A series of trials began and, jailed and tortured, the lepers confessed their crime. But the lepers were not alone. Various versions of the conspiracy circulated. It was the lepers; it was lepers stirred up by Jews; it was lepers stirred up by Jews stirred up by Moslem kings. The directors of the leper hospitals confessed that they had gathered many times to plan the conspiracy and had distributed to lepers poisons made of such dreadful things as toads, lizards, and human blood. The purpose of the conspiracy was to spread leprosy and to kill sane people, in order to overturn society: the directors of leper hospitals were dreaming of becoming king of France, duke of Burgundy, and so on. Other evidence emerged: in a letter found in Anjou a Jew wrote to the Moslem king of Jerusalem offering to exchange the kingship over Paris, France, and all Christendom for the Holy Land, which was to revert to the Jewish people. Letters from the Moslem kings of Granada and Tunis stirring up the lepers' and Jews' conspiracy were found in Mäcon and duly authenticated by local notaries.8 The king of France, Philip the Tall, confiscated all properties owned by leprosaries and ordered all lepers found guilty to be burned; innocent lepers had to live henceforth a life of strict segregation in closed institutions. In different parts of France there were mass murders of Jews. By paying a large ransom to the royal treasury Jews obtained permission to remain in the country for one more year, but in 1323 they were expelled from France.9 There is no doubt that a conspiracy was organized in 1321. There were two conspiracies, in fact: the first against the lepers, the second against the Jews. The evidence of these conspiracies lies in fake letters, fake confessions wrung by torture in Inquisitorial trials, and so on. It is worthwhile remembering that Michelet doubted the lepers' guilt (and rejected the accusations against the Jews as fake). During the time of the Dreyfus affair a Catholic scholar, J. M. Vidal, who discovered an extraordinary trial against the director of Pamiers hospital, Guillaume Agassa, emphasized the reality (as well as the ineffectiveness) of the lepers' conspiracy and implied that the Jews could have had a part in it. Some years ago the first editor of the Agassa trial, J. Duvernoy, tried to whitewash the judges (among them Jacques Fournier,

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43

bishop of Farmers), saying that they had extorted absurd confessions from the defendant in order to rescue him from being lynched by the crowd.10 In some ways the conspiracy is still a burning issue, but detailed analysis of the surviving evidence shows that in 1321 religious and political authorities deliberately faked evidence to reinforce a growing hostility from below against lepers and Jews. Many links connect the 1321 conspiracy to the emergence of the inquisitorial image of the witches' sabbat. Lepers and Jews were accused of placing not only poisons but also charms in wells, fountains, and rivers; lepers confessed that Jews asked them to renounce the Christian faith and to debase the Cross; lepers' gatherings foreshadowed in some ways the witches' nocturnal gatherings. But the main link is provided by the conspiracy itself — or by its myth.11 In an age of crisis (demographic, economic, political, and religious) marginal groups such as lepers and Jews, who had been associated in many ways in the public's perception, were physically segregated or ejected.12 For the first time in European history, the chain provided by the conspiracy myth (devil-Moslem kings-Jews-lepers) connected internal and external enemies, giving political and religious authorities the opportunity to purge society on a mass scale. In that chain, witches were still absent — but not for long. The second chapter of my story is also famous (or infamous). In 1348, the start of the Black Death again provoked accusations that wells and fountains were being poisoned. This time, however, there was only one target, the classic one: the Jews. The lepers had disappeared (leprosy was at the time receding throughout Europe). This new conspiracy had been discovered by the lord of Chillon, a small town on Lake Geneva. A group of Jews, men and women who lived in towns and villages around the lake (Montreux, Evian, Villeneuve), made confessions under torture, and these confessions all follow the same pattern: the defendants admitted having received letters and poison from abroad, usually from Toledo. The alleged criminals were put to death. The lord of Chillon sent a summary of the trials to the political authorities in Basel, Strasbourg, Bern, and elsewhere, urging them to punish their own prisoners. Not everybody agreed with this Jewish conspiracy theory: Chonrad von Winterthur, for instance, wrote a letter to Strasbourg saying that he had found the Jews to be

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totally innocent. He urged, notwithstanding the popular pressure against the Jews, that the Black Death had to be recognized as a scourge of God, not as a product of human malevolence. But in other places new evidence was found against the Jews: the Schlettstadt town councilors wrote a letter to their counterparts in Strasbourg informing them that a Jew had confessed to having put poison in some wells. So the persecution of the Jews went on.13 The most relevant aspect in these events is not the content of the confessions (in which there was no novelty) but their geographical location. Fifty years later, in 1409, Ponce Fougeyron, Inquisitor General over a large region that included Geneva and its environs, Dauphine, and so on, received a letter from Pope Alexander V. The pope expressed his grief that in Fougeyron's region Christians and Jews had together built "new sects and new rituals hostile to both faiths" (novas sectas et novos ritus eidem fidei repugnantes).14 What were these "new sects and new rituals?" It is impossible to identify them with the old, traditional magic because in the same letter the pope also condemned Christians and Jews who practiced "sorcery, divination, demons' invocation," and so on. I suggest the reference to "new sects and new rituals" is an allusion to the witches' sabbat, providing the missing link in the region between the accusation against the Jews as poisoners and the new image of witches as a threatening sect. Historians usually date the first recorded trials in which the sabbat played a major role to the Valais in 1428 - that is, nearly twenty years after the pope's letter to the Inquisitor who was in charge of the trials in the same region. But in Johannes Nider's Formicarius, a dialogue written during the Basel council in 14351437, there is a long passage on a new kind of witchcraft that began (Nider says) sixty years before; that is, around 1375.1S Nider's informants were a secular judge from Bern, Peter von Greyerz, who had sent many witches to the stake, and the Inquisitor of Evian (where Jews had confessed to using poison in 1348). The image of witchcraft emerging from the evidence recorded by Nider was new. The old stereotype of sexual orgies and ritual anthropophagy of babies born within the sect, assigned in the past to various heresies (Paulicians, Euchitians, Cathars, and others), was linked to witches, male and female. Moreover,

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45

these witches were supposed to attack not only their own children but also other parents' babies in their cradles.16 The fearful image of the witches' sect — much more dreadful than isolated sorcerers and magicians — was taking form at the same time on both sides of the Alps. The Inquisitor Bernardo da Como wrote at the beginning of the 16th century that the trials preserved in the archives of the local Inquisition indicated that a new kind of witchcraft, centered on the sabbat, had begun nearly one hundred fifty years earlier - that is, around 1350.17 In Nider's passage on the "new witches" we find many elements of the sabbat image: orgies, anthropophagy, renunciation of the Christian faith, homage to the Devil. Two elements, however, are conspicuously lacking: metamorphosis into animals and the magic flight. They appear for the first time in the Valais trials conducted in 1428. The judicial records are, unfortunately, lost: the only evidence is provided by a local chronicle, written ten years later. The trials lasted eighteen months; the defendants confessed only after having been tortured. They said that their sect ("gesellschaft") had seven hundred members and was fifty years old: had it lasted one more year, they would have become the lords of the land.18 This detail looks bizarre but it fits perfectly in the sequence I have suggested — the same accusation had been launched against the lepers in 1321. More than a century later, a full image of the sabbat had at last come to the surface. I suggested earlier that the final image of the sabbat was a compromise between learned (mainly inquisitorial) and popular elements. In fact, it is possible to argue that the sabbat image had such lasting success because it embodied in a perverted form the structure of an ancient myth, deeply rooted in the folklore of various parts of Europe. The Valais witches confessed that coming back from their gatherings they drank wine from the cellars. The same detail can be found in the confessions of the Friulian benandanti in 1575 and in the confessions of Arnaud Ge"lis from Haute Ariege in 1319.19 This wide divergence in absolute chronology is irrelevant: from the point of view of relative chronology, all three documents come from the same layer of popular culture. At this level we must forget the tight, unilinear chronology and the close geographical sequence that I tried to reconstruct in the first part of this article. On the contrary, we must suggest the

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existence of a plural, flexible time, full of flashbacks and stagnations as well as the possibility of a meaningful convergence of data in a widely scattered space.20 To analyze the mythical content of the sabbat, utterly ignored by those historians of witchcraft who despised the "mental rubbish of peasant credulity and feminine hysteria," we must use the intellectual tools provided by symbolic anthropology and the history of religions. Above all we need a broad, comparative approach. The detail about people drinking wine in the cellars is truly mythical; it is connected with the dead. The armier Arnaud Ge"lis "went with the dead"; so did the benandanti in Friuli, the kerstniki in the Balkan peninsula, the kallikantzaroi in Greece, the calusarii in Rumania, the taltos in Hungary, the Ossetic Burkudzäutä in the Caucasus, and the Lapp and Siberian shamans.21 Rather than demonstrate analytically the deep, structural unity underlying these cultural phenomena, as well as describing their specific symbolic richness, I shall confine myself to some basic conclusions. In a very wide cultural area we find the belief that certain people, men or women, could communicate with the world of the dead. Their role, duly recognized by the community, was linked to specific physical features (being born with the caul, as the benandanti, or with teeth, a*> the taltos), calendar circumstances (being born in the Twelve Days, as the kallikantzaroi), or psychological attitudes (as the case of the Lapp or Siberian shamans). Their journey to the world of the dead was usually preceded by an ecstatic sleep, during which the soul left the body as though dead. This ecstasy could be self-induced or aided by narcotic drugs — fly agaric in the case of Lapp or Siberian shamans, ergot (I suspect) in many European contexts. But drugs obviously cannot explain the mythical content of this journey into the beyond. Communication with the dead or battles with evil spirits to ensure the crops' fertility, performed by the chosen people, expressed in mythical form basic emotional needs in the life of the community. It is difficult to say how old this myth is. The answer will probably be provided by its puzzling geographical distribution. Maybe it is Indo-European, possibly even older. Its central role in fairy tales (as demonstrated by Propp22) is probably a clue to remote antiquity. More subtle but sounder research tools will

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eventually allow us to date more precisely this deep cultural layer. I suggest therefore that the fundamental contribution of popular culture to the image of witches' sabbat — that is, animal metamorphosis and magic flight - is connected with the mythical journey into the beyond.23 In other words, the image of the sabbat took its full form when and where the stereotype of a group threatening society as a whole mingled with a deep layer of beliefs related to the possibility of communicating with the world of the dead. It could be objected that the geographical area where this myth spread did not coincide with the diffusion area of the belief related to the witches' sabbat. But we know that Inquisitors and lay judges extorted, with the aid of torture, confessions about the sabbat from nothing - that is, from people totally foreign to this deep layer of popular culture (the case of the Arras Vauderie in 1460 is a good example). The spread of the sabbat image must be distinguished from the form in which it coalesced for the first time. This happened, as we have seen, in the Western Alps around 1350. In the folklore ofthat region themes like the Wild Hunt (that is, the procession of dead souls) and werewolves were conspicuous. Nider in his Formicarius compared the "new witches" to wolves; the Vaudois witches confessed in 1428 that with the aid of the Devil, they could transform themselves into wolves. Now, the werewolf belief was recorded as early as in Herodotus and is certainly related to ritual death, followed by a mythical journey into the world of the dead.24 In conclusion, in the sabbat image we can detect deep roots in popular culture. But how did those Alpine peasants and shepherds accept the distortion of their myths that the Inquisitors suggested? How did those benevolent figures, magical protectors of the community, become malignant witches, enemies of men's, women's, cattle's, and crops' fertility? Obviously, physical and psychological pressures must have played a major role. This is an easy guess, but the earliest trials centered on the sabbat are lost. A more analytic (albeit analogical) answer is provided by the extraordinary evidence I discovered twenty years ago in the Eastern Alps. There, as though in slow motion, we can see how, between 1575 and 1650, the benandanti, urged by the Inquisitors, lost their original character as protectors of crops against the witches to become themselves diabolical witches going to the sab-

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bat. It is probable that in the same way the image of the sabbat was diffused in other parts of Europe. We can certainly speak, in this case, of cultural violence but it is a violence that followed, as I have demonstrated, a cultural compromise. Relations between learned and popular culture are rarely a one-way process.

NOTES 1. H. R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries (London: 1969), p. 41. 2. M. Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921; Oxford: 1962). 3. N. Conn, Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-hunt (London: 1975), pp. 111-15. 4. Cf. Cohn, Europe's, pp. 18 ff. The accusation of sexual orgies (including incest) recurs several times in hostile sources on the Paulicians: cf. Ch. Astruc et al., eds., Les sources grecques pour l'histoire des Pauliciens d'Asie Mineure, in Travaux et Memoires du Centre de Recherche d'Histoire et Civilisation Byzantine, 4 (1970), pp. 92, 131, 201, 205 (section edited by J. Gouillard; 1 am grateful to Evelyne Patlagean for this reference, as well as for other useful suggestions). In all these passages, however, anthropophagy is conspicuously absent: there is only a vague reference to "ashes of babies' umbilical cords mixed with food for ceremonial purposes" in a well-known formula of anathema, ascribed either to the 9th or to the middle 10th century (ibid., pp. 188-89, 201). Both themes (incest and anthropophagy) can be found in John of Ojun's sermon: cf. Domini Jo hannis Philosophi Ozniensis Armeniorum Catholici Opera, ed. by G. B. Aucher (Venice: 1834), pp. 85 ff. See also N. G. Garsoian, The Paulician Heresy (The Hague and Paris: 1967), pp. 94-95. 5. See P. Gautier, "Le De daemonibus du Pseudo-Cellos," Revue des etudes byzantines 38 (1980), pp. 105-94. For the passage on orgies, see pp, 140—41. The author suggests, tentatively, that the dialogue could have been written after 1250 or even later (p. 131). 6. See for instance Biondo's well-known passage on the Fraticelli; having described their orgies he went on to say "sive vero ex huiusmodi coitu conceperit mulier, infans genitus ad conventiculum illud in speluncam delatus per singulorum manus traditum tamdiu totiensque baiulandus quousque animam exhalaverit. Isque in cuius manibus infans expiraverit maximus pontifex divino ut aiunt spiritu creatus habetur . . . " (F. Biondo, Italia illustrata [Verona: 1482], cc. E r-v). The last detail is a precise echo of John of Ojun's text: "Similiter et primum parientis foeminae puerum de manu in manum inter eos invicem projectum, quum pessima morte occiderint, ilium, in cujus manu exspiravit puer, ad primam sectae dignitatem provectum venerantur" (Opera, p. 87; quotation from J. B. Aucher's Latin translation of the Armenian original).

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7. There is still no full study of it. Among local studies see L. Guibert, "Les lepreux et les leproseries de Limoges," Bulletin de la societe' archeologique et historique du Limousin, 4 (1905), pp. 5-146; Vincent, "Le complot de 1320 contre les lepreux et ses repercussions en Poitou," Bulletin de la Societe des Antiquaires de l'Ouest, 3d series, 7 (1927), pp. 325-44; G. Lavergne, "La persecution et spoliation des lepreux a Perigueux en 1321," Recueil de travaux offert a M. Clovis Brunei .. . (Paris: 1955), 2: 107-13. For more comprehensive reconstructions, see H. Chretien, Le pretendu complot des Juifs etlepreux en 1321 (Chäteauroux: 1887);J. M. Vidal, "La poursuite des lepreux en 1321 d'apres des documents nouveaux," Annales de Saint-Louis-des-Franqais, 4 (1900), pp. 419-78; R. Anchel, Les Juifs en France (Paris: 1946), pp. 79-91; V. R. RiviereChalan, La marque infame des lepreux et de Christians sous l'Anden Regime (Paris: 1978). See the accurate study by M. Barber, "The Plot to Overthrow Christendom in 1321," History 66(February 1981),pp. 1-17, who denies the existence of a conspiracy from above. On this point, I follow the reconstruction suggested in Riviere-Chalan's essay, which Barber seems to have missed. 8. The relevant chronicles are listed in Vidal, "La poursuite." The letter found in Anjou, sent by Philip, count of Anjou, to Pope John XXII, is printed in G. D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum nova, et amplissima collectio (Venice: 1782), 25, coll. 569-572: it was accepted as a trustworthy document by the antisemite writer L. Rupert, L'Eglise et la synagogue (Paris: 1859), pp. 172 ff., and rejected as an example of false accusations concocted against the Jews (with an obvious link to the Dreyfus affair) by Chretien, Le pretendu, p. 17; rather surprisingly, subsequent literature on the subject has ignored it. The two letters to the Moslem kings, already mentioned as fake by H. Sauval, Histoire et recherches des antiquites de la ville de Paris (Paris: 1724), 2: 517-18, were also printed by Chretien and then, as unpublished, by Vidal, "La poursuite," pp. 459-61. 9. Cf. Anchel, Les Juifs, pp. 86 ff., and B. Blumenkranz, "A propos des Juifs en France sous Charles IV le Bel," Archives juives, 6 (1969-70), pp. 36-38, who corrects the usually accepted date (1322) for the expulsion. 10. Cf. J. Michelet, Histoire de France (livres V-IX), ed. by P. Viallaneix Oeuvres computes, V (Paris: 1975), pp. 155-57; Vidal, "La poursuite"; J. Duvernoy, Le registre d'Inquisition de Jacques Fournier (1318-1325} (Paris: 1965), 2: 135-47, especially p. 135 fn. For a different interpretation of the Agassa trial see E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montailloux, village occitan de 1294 1324 (Paris: 1975), pp. 17, 583 fn. 1. 11. In a forthcoming book I will explore the connection between the 1321 conspiracy and some events that in different ways prepared for it (the trials against the Templars; the alleged attempt made by Hugues Geraud, bishop of Cahors, to kill Pope John XXII; the Pastoureaux crusade). 12. Cf. U. Robert, Les signes d'infamie au Moyen Age (Paris: 1889), pp. 11, 90-91, 148; J.-C. Schmitt, "L'histoire des marginaux," in La Nouvelle histoire, ed. by J. Le Goff (Paris: 1978), p. 355.

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13. Cf. J. von Königshoven, Die älteste Teutsche so wol Allgemeine als insonderheit Elsassische und S trass burgische Chronicke . . . (Strasbourg: 1698), pp. 1029-1048; Urkundenbuch der Stadt Strassburg, V, ed. by H. Witte and G. Wolfram (Strasbourg: 1896), pp. 162-79. Forageneral summary, see The Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. "Black Death." For more detailed accounts see, among others, R. Hoeniger, Der schwarze Tod in Deutschland (Berlin: 1882); A. Lopez de Meneses, "Una consequencia de la Feste Negra en Cataluna: el pogrom de 1348," Sefarad, 19 (1975), pp. 92-131, 321-64; J. Schatzmiller, "Les Juifs de Provence pendant la Feste Noire," Revue des etudes juives, 133 (1974), pp. 457-80. For the cultural background of the persecution, see S. Guerchberg, "La controverse sur les pretendus semeurs de la Feste Noire d'apres les traites de peste de l'epoque," Revue des etudes juives, 108 (1948), pp. 3-40. 14. Cf. L. Wadding, Annales Minorum, IX (Rome: 1734), pp. 327-29. 15. Cf. J. Nider, Formicarius, book 5, chap. 4. it seems that this section of the dialogue was written in 1437: cf. K. Schieler, Magister Johannes Nider aus dem Orden der Prediger-Brüder. Ein Beitrag zur Kirchengeschichte des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts (Mainz: 1885), p. 379 fn. 5. 16. On Peter von Greyerz see J. Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalters (Bonn: 1901), p. 91 fn. 2. For the passages on witches devouring babies see Formicarius, book 5, chap. 3. 17. Cf. Cohn, Europe's, pp. 145-46, who, however, dismisses this authority on the ground that "no later writer has found any trace of the documents in question, though the archives of Como have been searched by historians who had these matters in mind." It must be emphasized that no scholar (including Cantu, quoted by Cohn) ever had access to the ecclesiastical archives of Como, where the inquisitorial records might be preserved - if they had survived wars, fires, and pillage across the centuries. (My own attempts to enter this archive have been wholly unsuccessful.) On the other hand, in his discussion of Nider's treatise (Europe's, pp. 204-5) Cohn does not take account of the very precise chronological statement that follows the description of the anthropophagous witches: "Praeterea quemadmodum a supradicto Petro iudice audivi in territorio Bernensium et in locis eidem adiacentibus a sexaginta circiter annis superfata malefitia a multis practicata sunt." The remarkable convergence between Nider's and Bernardo da Como's chronologies makes the latter altogether convincing. 18. Cf. Th. von Liebenau, ed., "Von den Hexen, so in Wallis verbrannt wurdent in den Tagen, do Cristofel von Silinen herr und richter was," Anzeiger für schweizerische Geschichte, n.s. 9 (1902-1905), pp. 135-38; J. B. Bertrand, "Notes sur les proces d'here'sie et de sorcellerie en Valais," Annales Valaisannes, 3 (August 1921), pp. 166-67, 173 ff. 19. Cf. C. Ginzburg, I benandanti (Turin: 1972), pp. 7, 63-64; J. Duvernoy, Le registre, l: 139; Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, pp. 592 ff. 20. Cf. J. Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age (Paris: 1978), p. 314 fn. 12.

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21. On the kerstniki cf. M. Boskoviö-Stulli, "Kresnik-Krsnik, ein Wesen aus der kroatischen und slowenischen Volksüberlieferung," Fabula, 3 (195960) pp. 275-98. On the kallikantzaroi, J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (1910; New York: 1964, with an introduction by A. N. Oikonomides), pp. 190 ff.; P. P. Argenti and H. J. Rose, The Folk-Lore of Chios (Cambridge: 1949), pp. 21 ff., 242 ff. On the calusarii, O. Buhociu, "Le folklore roumain de printemps," thesis (University of Paris: 1957); Gail Kligman, Calus: Symbolic Transformation in Romanian Rituals (Chicago: 1981). On the taltos, see the excellent essay by G. Klaniczay, "Benandante—kresnik—zduhac—taltos," Ethnographia 84 (1983), pp. 116-33 (which I was able to read in an English translation kindly prepared by the author.). On theßurkudzäutä, G. Dumezil, Le probleme des Centaures (Paris: 1929), pp. 91—93; for an earlier report see J. Klaproth, Voyage au Mont Caucase et en Georgie (Paris: 1823), 2: 255. The connection between taltos and shamans has been repeatedly discussed: see for instance V. Dioszegi, ed., Glaubenswelt und Folklore der Sibirischen Volker (Budapest: 1963); on benandanti and shamans, the hypothesis suggested in Ginzburg, Benandanti, p. 3, has been confirmed by M. Eliade, "Some Observations on European Witchcraft," History of Religions, 14 (1975), pp. 153-58. 22. See V. Propp, Le radici storiche dei racconti di fate (1946; Turin: 1949). Propp's analysis of the mythical content of fairy tales is very convincing; much more debatable is his attempt to decipher in them the traces of specific rites: see M. Eliade, Aspects du my the (Paris: 1963), pp. 23536. It must be emphasized that, notwithstanding the debts paid to Stalinist orthodoxy, Propp's book remains an outstanding contribution. 23. This hypothesis was advanced, on the basis of much more circumscribed evidence, in my book on Benandanti (see particularly pp. 30—35). I did not notice that a similar interpretation had been already suggested, albeit with a question mark, by J. Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 4th ed., edited by E. H. Meyer (Berlin: 1876), 2: 906 (Teutonic Mythology [London: 1883], 2: 1082). 24. Cf. Nider, Formicarius, book 5, chap. 3: "idem inquisitor [of Evian] et dominus Petrus [of Bern] mini retulerunt et fama communis habet circa districtum Bernensis dominii quidam malefici utriusque sexus qui contra humane nature inclinacionem ymo adversus condiciones spetierum omnium bestiarum lupina specie excepta tantummodo proprie spetiei infantes vorant et comedere solent"; "Von den Hexen," p. 136. See also J. Sprenger and H. Institoris, Malleus maleficarum, \nMalleorum quorundum maleficarum, tarn veterum quam recentium authorum, tomi duo (Frankfurt: 1582), p. 13: "moderni malefici saepius opere daemonum transformantur in lupos et alias bestias. . . ." On the interpretation of belief in werewolves, still fundamental is W. H. Röscher, "Das von der 'Kynanthropie' handelnde Fragment des Marcellus von Side," Abhandlungen der philologisch-historischen Classe der königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 17 (1897).

Sacerdote ovvero strione: Ecclesiastical and Superstitious Remedies in 16th Century Italy

MARY R. O'NEIL

Both Catholic and Protestant orthodoxies of the 16th century responded to the "ignorance and superstition" of the European people with a mixture of catechesis and repression. Preachers, schoolmasters, and church courts all participated in an intensive effort to raise the religious and moral level of society by enforcing stricter standards of belief and behavior. But despite similarities in learned laments and in the apparatus of indoctrination, important differences existed between Protestant and Catholic approaches to this "reform of popular culture," differences that are clearly visible in their programs for the suppression of magical beliefs and practices.1 The Protestant Reformation eliminated ecclesiastically sanctioned remedies against misfortunes of both natural and supernatural origin, urging reliance on prayer and trust in divine providence as the correct approach to adversity. By contrast, active mediation with supernatural forces for human benefit remained basic to the sacramental and ceremonial core of Catholicism. The Roman Church did, however, wish to redirect popular attempts at independent access to the supernatural into orthodox channels, thus consolidating its monopoly on dealing with positive and negative supernatural forces alike.2 Magical self-help was to be combatted not with Protestant stoicism but through the liberal provision of authorized, clerically administered relief.

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A clear statement of orthodox responsibility for combatting the effects commonly attributed to negative supernatural forces (maleficium3 and possession) is presented in Fra Girolamo Menghi's Compendia dett'arte essorcista of 1576. Citing a range of evidence including Scripture, canon law, and the "testimony of the common people of practically every nation who suffer in great numbers from various maleficial infirmities," Menghi defended the reality of diabolical harm against the skeptics who wished to trace such injuries to natural (if hidden) causes.4 The recapitulation of traditional demonology and witch lore in Books I and II of the Compendia served as background to the central purpose of the treatise, the discussion of orthodox remedies against such dangers. It would be a shameful and indecent thing for an expert physician to describe in his writings the symptoms of various illnesses, unless he also knew the preventative and curative remedies that applied in each case. In order that no one should judge this modest effort of ours to be curious, vain, superfluous and composed to no purpose, we wish, like an expert physician who first diagnoses the sickness and then applies the appropriate remedies, to speak in this third book of the protective and curative remedies which correspond to the infirmities discussed above, so that with these remedies each person can defend himself against the assaults of demons and witches.5

The remedies to which Menghi counseled recourse were "exorcisms and other forces of ecclesiastical medicine," among which he included pilgrimages, confession, and the sign of the cross. Although he took no overt stand against witch hunting, that option is conspicuously absent. For Menghi, the medicine ecclesiastiche are sufficient to thwart or reverse the actions of demons and witches alike. An experienced Franciscan exorcist, Menghi gave particular emphasis to the broadly remedial functions of exorcism, which could be used to undo the effects of maleflcia as well as possession.6 The Compendious assertion of the efficacy of traditional ecclesiastical remedies was aimed at several different groups. The most sophisticated consisted of those "elevated intellects" who denied the utility of exorcism along with the reality of possession and maleficia. Mistaking demonic presence for madness or disease, they discouraged people from calling in exorcists and thus served as tools of a carefully planned diabolical ploy to achieve the unilateral disarmament of the human race.7 At the other end

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of the cultural spectrum were those who firmly believed in the necessity for protection against maleficia but who turned to magical and superstitious remedies rather than to those approved by the Church. Somewhere between these extremes lay the central audience for Menghi's manual, the clerics and exorcists whose task it was to dispense the various medicine ecclesiastiche in an orthodox manner.8 In both timing and content, Menghi's work forms part of the post-Tridentine effort to reform various aspects of popular belief and behavior, an effort that involved clergy of all levels in the struggle against popular error. The regional offices of the Roman Inquisition stepped up prosecution of superstitious offenses in the period after 1570, leading to a marked increase in trials against lay persons involved in magical healing, divination, and love magic.9 The parallel task of preventing recourse to magical remedies was delegated to the local representatives of orthodoxy, the parish clergy and the friars. The quasi-ethnographic character of the campaign to detect and catalogue the possible forms of superstitious error can be seen in the recommendation made in 1577 to the curates of Bologna by the annual congregation of parish priests meeting under episcopal auspices. They should seek to collect all the superstitions, incantations and brevi da portar adosso [handwritten prayers or charms, worn or carried on one's person] containing superstitious words, unapproved names and similar abuses. Even if they do not appear to be evil, they should be collected and notice given of them, for it is planned that a small book warning of these matters should be compiled.10

Inquisitorial edicts required preachers to use sermons as an occasion for exhortations against magical remedies and gave detailed instructions on the precise types of possible offenses. Absolution in confession was made contingent on denunciation not just of one's own failings in this regard but of the observed lapses of neighbors and relatives as well.11 Such decrees were aimed in particular at the illiterate and uneducated, the pusillis et ntdibus Christifidelibus, and the clergymen who read the edicts constituted, in the Tridentine model, the front line of defense against such rustic errors.12 As a program for the elimination of superstition, this model required that clerics themselves be of certified orthodoxy so that in the most remote village there would be at least one person

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qualified to tell a legitimate prayer from a superstitious charm, a natural remedy from a magical cure. The trials that the Inquisition conducted against clerics and exorcists for superstitious offenses in the late 16th century therefore indicate both a flaw in the model and a determination to remedy that flaw. Out of sixty-four trials held in Modena between 1580 and 1600 on charges of superstition, twelve, or close to 20 percent, were directed against clerics, four of whom were exorcists.13 Thus the specialists in orthodox alternatives to superstitious remedies were repeatedly found guilty of complicity in the very errors they were charged to eradicate. Drawing on Inquisition records from Modena, Bologna, and Venice in the late 16th century, this essay examines the exercise of the remedial function by the lower clergy.14 Recruited from among artisans or peasants, this group occupied a crucial position as mediators between the cultural levels of early modern society. They acted as the local representatives of orthodoxy but nonetheless they often shared both milieu and mentalite with their parishioners. The trials of ordinary clerics for superstitious offenses reflect ambiguities that stemmed from their incomplete personal transitions between culture folklorique and culture clericale, as well as from their role as administrators of one of a set of parallel and competing remedies for maleflcial injuries.15 This essay considers the church's concern for detecting clerical complicity in popular errors, the laity's expectations from clerically administered remedies, and the predicaments of individual clerics as they attempted to respond to often-conflicting demands. Given the sacramental and teaching functions entrusted to the lowliest priest, clerical superstition was inherently far more dangerous to orthodoxy than the lay variety. The lengthy and probing interrogations to which clerics were subjected when arrested reveal the hierarchy's concern for assuring that its own delegates, at least, acted only within authorized channels. The laymen and women tried by the Inquisition in the late 16th century were more frequently involved in the actual practice of magical remedies; but clerical trials provide more information about the development and application of the orthodox category of "superstition" itself. For although lay persons were asked whether they knew a given procedure to be forbidden, only clerics were questioned in any depth about the assumptions

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underlying their suspect actions or about their understanding of why a given action might be considered superstitious. This difference in style of interrogation of lay and clerical defendants can be illustrated by comparing the trial of an uneducated, sixtyyear-old Modenese with that of a literate Franciscan in Venice. The Modenese Inquisition found Antonio de Correggi guilty in 1595 of the superstitious offenses of "vain observance of times and abuse of the Gospel" in connection with his technique of curing fevers by reciting the opening verses of Saint John's Gospel over the sick person on a hilltop at sunrise, on Good Friday, or on the feast of Saint John the Baptist. The court's sentence indicated that his error was essentially a jurisdictional one, that of believing the "holy words, the most holy gospel and holy days . . . can be used for ends other than those instituted by the Holy Church."10 Antonio's replies show, however, that he did not categorize his admitted actions in the court's terms. He had heard the "priest say many times, both at the altar and in confession, that one should not practice superstitious customs." But when pressed on what this meant, Antonio replied, "by superstitious things, I mean doing harm to one's neighbor, taking another person's goods and so forth." The numerous edicts against superstition read in church and aimed at the illiterate had succeeded only partially in Antonio's case. He knew that superstition was "wrong" but it remained simply a synonym for a generic concept of sin as doing harm to others.17 Significantly the Inquisitor made no comment on Antonio's lack of understanding of the concept, and hence of the charges against him, but moved to the next on a list of prepared questions. If the trial did not expand Antonio's theological understanding, it did alert him to the fact that his sunrise healing, effective though it might have been, had to be discontinued. Such reliance on the coercive setting of the trial and the lack of any attempt to convey just what made a given action "superstitious" is typical of Inquisitorial procedure against the uneducated laity. By contrast a Franciscan in Venice, also charged with superstitious healing, faced more intensive and doctrinally revealing interrogations in his 1590 trial. As a cure for fevers, Fra Geremia da Udine dispensed pieces of paper (bollettini or polizze) on each of which he had written the name of one of the twelve

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Apostles. The sick person was to open one of these folded papers each day, burning it if the fever persisted; but if the fever abated, he should vow to fast on the vigil of the Apostle named for that day and should not burn the paper. Fra Geremia's open distribution of this charm from the scuola of the Franciscan convent constituted an informal imprimatur that caused the Inquisition to regard his case with particular seriousness. Since he did not simply offer this to people, but they came to ask for 'the cure even without his knowing them, this is a clear sign that it was public knowledge in Venice that he dispensed this medication. . . . This dottrina or secreta of his was notorious and the people flocked to him to get these bollettini.18

Directed insistently at the defendant's grasp of the concept of superstition, the interrogation of Fra Geremia was undertaken to educate as well as to convict. It goes well beyond the coercive scope of Antonio's trial and attempts to isolate precisely the error in Geremia's healing procedure. I: If it seemed to him that this was licit, knowing it rather to be pure and simple superstition, and furthermore irreverence towards the name of the Apostle which was to be burned. R: It seems bad to me, but I did it for the benefit of those persons, and I never received anything for it. I: If it seems just to him to do evil for the benefit of others. R: It no longer seems just, no. I knew that I was doing wrong, but I did it to heal them of that sickness.19

Although it is not specified that the fevers cured by Fra Geremia's procedure were of maleficial origin, a standard issue in the literature on the prevention and cure of witchcraft was "whether it is permissible to do harm in order to do good." The debate centered on the legitimacy of dissolving maleflcia by means of further maleflcia; supporters of strictly orthodox remedies like Girolamo Menghi argued that death should be preferred to a maleficial cure.20 Fra Geremia's good intentions and his desire to respond to people's needs by any available means are thus dismissed as irrelevant for only the character of the means employed was at issue, not the worthiness of the goal. Seeking to "clarify in what way it seemed to him that he had done wrong," the court asked

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whether he saw it as the act of a faithful Christian to burn the paper with the name of an Apostle on it when the fever persisted, as if in scorn and resentment for not having been granted this favor (gratia)?'1

Fra Geremia explained that the bollettino was to be burned without being opened, implying that if one did not know the name of the Apostle no disrespect could be construed. The judges were unimpressed, noting that "this amounts to the same thing, for it is the act of throwing it on the fire that creates the superstition and shows neglect of that Apostle."22 Nowhere does this interrogation hint that this cure is superstitious because it does not work; together with Geremia and his Venetian following the court accepts, or at least does not contest, the efficacy of the charm. Rather, the cure was judged superstitious precisely because of the manner in which it did work — through an inappropriate method of appeal to the Apostles.23 Responding to his explanation that the bollettino was to be burned so that it would take on the sickness, the court noted that "from this reply of his, it seems that he wanted to force the Apostles. If they wanted to free themselves, they must heal the sick person in order not to be burned at the end of the day."24 The cure, then, went beyond simple irreverence to active coercion of the Apostles through a classic combination of bribery and threats. A tacit acceptance of the magical principle that the written name represents the Apostle, so that burning the name is tantamount to an assault on the Apostle himself, underlies the court's concern for this aspect of the cure.25 While less attention is given to the reward held out to the cooperative saint, the assumption that the cure was indeed effected through Apostolic agency may explain the absence in this trial of the standard charge of implicit diabolism. Although often accepted by the Inquisition in cases of lay superstition, Fra Geremia's last line of defense, "I did this out of simplicity and not out of disrespect towards any saint," was rejected out of hand: "since he is a religious and lettered, his claim of simplicity is not credible."26 Holding clerics to stricter standards than the laity is consonant with the Church's definition of their role in society. Yet the frequency of clerical activity judged superstitious by the Church indicates that the actual position of clerics vis-ä-vis the beliefs and practices of the pusillis et rudibus was less distant than hoped.

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Considered in this light, Fra Geremia's defense of semplicita emerges as more than a last-ditch effort to exculpate himself. It was also a description of his own participation in a milieu and a set of beliefs that he had learned to perceive as characteristic of simple, uneducated people.27 His explanation that "I learned this thing at Udine when I was a boy, but I never taught it to anyone," reflects a division in his own experience that was both geographic and ideological: a childhood in Friuli, about which we know only that he learned this cure, and a clerical adulthood in Venice, where his provincial lore, though well received by the people "who flocked to him to get these bollettini" was readily discerned as superstitious by the enforcers of public orthodoxy and, after some coerced reflection, by Fra Geremia himself.28 However, not all clerical remedies were unorthodox. The legitimate healing activities of clerics included simple blessings, reading prayers, and dispensing handwritten brevi containing orthodox texts. Mothers frequently brought their sick children to priests to have them blessed with the sign of the cross (segnati) or to have prayers read over them (legere sopra)\ these routine, noncontroversial matters are encountered throughout the trial records. The Bolognese plan of 1577 to collect even those brevi that "do not appear to be evil" reflects the suspicions aroused by the circulation of unapproved formulae. Yet if the words they contained could be shown to be orthodox, the wearing or carrying of such brevi was permissible, even advisable.29 All of these less formal measures could be appropriately invoked to mitigate any illness, including those of natural origin, but the more potent clerical remedies of conjuration (scongiurare) and exorcism (esorcizzare) were reserved for maleficial conditions of negative supernatural origin. Although Italian exorcist literature does describe public dispossessions similar to the famous episodes of post-Reformation France, the exorcist activity that Inquisition trials describe was of a far less spectacular variety. It focused on undoing the effects of maleficia rather than on direct encounters with possessing demons.30 The concentration on curing disease placed exorcists squarely in the ranks of the healers; to their public they represented a source of concrete aid, an alternative to either medical advice or the local village healer.

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Since an exorcist could not deal effectively with diseases of natural origin, his first order of business was discerning maleflcia, a task complicated by the fact that the same disease could arise from either natural or maleficial causes. Exorcist manuals attempted to introduce some rigor into this inherently difficult process by spelling out criteria for distinguishing the different sources of identical symptoms.31 In practice, however, adherence to such guidelines was lax; Girolamo Menghi inveighed at length against exorcists' ignorance of "the knowledge required for the exercise of this art," and cited examples from his own experience. In a certain city of Lombardy, I saw one of these [exorcists] with my own eyes, who had never had a book of this art in his hands, and nevertheless promised that he could recognize and cure all the maleficati that he saw, and they flocked to his hands. So widely had his reputation spread that people came to him from all parts of Italy to have their ailments cured. He maintained that he discerned and cured them by certain powders and waters which he offered to them. He went to such lengths in this that although he might be at a great distance from the sick person, he declared that he could nonetheless recognize illnesses, often divining symptoms as well at a distance.32

The manuals did not provide for detecting maleflcia in the absence of the victim; to Menghi, such abilities implied either fraud or divination. Although this function was officially within the competence of the exorcist alone, in practice the relatives and neighbors of a sick person often made initial diagnoses of maleficium before calling in an expert. Testifying in the 1582 trial of Don Teofilo Zani, official exorcist of the Cathedral Church in Modena, Francesca dei Vincenzi described the exorcism of her nephew. Thomaso, the little son of my brother, was sick. He was so distressed and screamed so loudly that he was judged by various people to be maleficato. So it was suggested by his grandmother that we call in Don Teofilo to exorcize Thomaso.33

Though presumably he could have made an independent diagnosis, reversing or confirming the untutored perceptions of the family, Don Teofilo seems to have felt no need for a conclusive verdict on the origin of Thomaso's illness; he went ahead with his standard procedure as the family wished. Twice I signed and exorcized a child suspected of being maleficato; this I

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did at the request of the mother of Madonna Francheschina who came in person to ask me, and also had her capellano, Don Sebastian Sassolo, ask me. . . . But to tell the truth, I had little desire to do so.34

Familial pressure overcame Zani's professional doubts but his reservations about the efficacy of exorcism in this case were shared by Francesca, who witnessed the procedure. [Zani] tried all the remedies customarily used on the maleficati; I was present at the beginning, but seeing those ointments of his it appeared to me that Thomaso continued to scream and cry, so I doubted it was having any effect.35

In her opinion, the boy had always been and still was sickly (mal conditionato); he had not been exorcized since. Like the original diagnosis, the decision to abandon exorcism was not made by the clerical expert but by the family, which seems to have retreated to a naturalistic explanation. It was at this crucial point — deciding whether and where to seek relief — that many lay persons fell into error. The alternatives open to them were posed with particular clarity during the interrogation of a woman whose maleficato child had been cured by Don Teofilo Zani in 1578. A pious widow, Gasparina Ballotta, testified to the Inquisition that she was regularly visited by an apparition that took the form of various deceased relatives. She was accustomed to consult with her cosa spirituale on issues of importance, such as that under urgent consideration by the Livizzano family, to which she was related by marriage.36 Their daughter Laura was fatturata (bewitched) and her mother Margarita wished to know "whether there is a remedy to the sickness of Madonna Laura, whether of witches or of priests — sia di strione hover di sacerdote." Gasparina's vision assured her that they "didn't want any witches involved, but only ministers of Christ," and approved the choice of Zani as exorcist on the condition that he would do this "as a work of charity."37 The reply served the cause of orthodoxy but the initial question illustrates the options that the worried family considered. Clearly, the remedial powers of the sacerdote were perceived as parallel to those of other local healers of maleficia, here classified as strioni. Laura's mother was willing to follow the recommendation to seek out an exorcist rather than a witch but she felt the need to

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know more than just how to remove the fattura. Gasparina was thus instructed to question her vision on a further point. Madonna Margarita wanted to know if she had been harmed (guasta) by her husband's mother or by her brother-in-law, and whether her children too had been harmed by them, as she assumed to be the case.38

Her acceptance of the orthodox remedy notwithstanding, Margarita suspected that the root cause of the problem lay in the hostility of her husband's family and wanted this confirmed. Later witnesses would testify that Gasparina's vision had indeed "caused discord and dissension between many people by saying this person had bewitched (maleficavit) this or that one."39 But Gasparina's own version of the apparition's response to Margarita — "My child, let Jesus Christ look to souls and sins" — piously deflected concern away from identifying the agents of the maleflcium (the essential impulse behind witch hunting) and toward the remedial approach of undoing their effects through orthodox means.40 In fact, not everyone who perceived an act of maleflcium sought to identify the perpetrator. But such an approach is certainly underrepresented in the sources since it produced no charges and no trial records. The stoic response is however occasionally visible, as in the testimony of a reluctant witness, Isabella, called in 1579 during Maria de Mariani's trial on charges of maleflcium. In answer to the court's questioning about Maria's reputation in the rural Villa di Fre, she replied: I know of not a single malefica. Although six of my little children have been guasti and all of them died, from the first to the last, I never wanted to find out who had undone them.41

Since the desire to identify the source of such injuries had more drastic consequences than this silent endurance, it is the various methods by which such identification took place that have become the focus of historical interest. In the case of Gasparina and her vision, the stoic response was accompanied by recourse to the ecclesiastical remedy of exorcism, thus lending support to Keith Thomas's argument that there was an inverse correlation between witch hunting and the availability of orthodox remedies for maleficial conditions in the post-Reformation period.42 However, the concept of maleflcium re-

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mained incomplete without its perpetrator for it was only through the identification of someone who wished the victim harm that suffering became meaningful.43 The idea tends strongly toward the naming of a culprit, whether or not that person is punished, and despite their role as custodians of the medicine ecclesiastiche clerics were no more immune than their parishioners to such culturally grounded thought processes. Indeed, if Gasparina's edifying account of her role in urging Margarita to let higher powers settle the accounts is a reliable one, she was being far more careful than her clerical advisor. For, once having accepted the invitation to exorcize Madonna Laura, Don Teofilo Zani displayed an unseemly interest in the circumstances and authors of her maleficial condition. As Margarita Livizzano explained, he said it had been necessary to recite a Gospel at Santa Chiara, and that all the evildoers who had bewitched (fatturato) the girl had gone one by one to that church while he recited the Gospel. After this he had a Vesper said in San Domenico . . . saying this was necessary for the health of the girl, because another Vesper had been said in that church in maleficio against her.44

In the opinion of the official exorcist of the Modenese Duomo it was thus possible to use a liturgical ceremony both to cast a maleficial spell and to undo one, and to use the Mass as a charm to ferret out the agents of such a maleflcium. To Gasparina, he disclosed exactly who they were. While he sang the Gospel, he saw them going back and forth past the doors of the Church, and he said there was Madonna Orsolina, the mother of Augusto Livizzano, and Giovanni Maria, her son.45

Questioned by the Inquisition on these points, Zani denied none of Margarita's allegations. I: Whether he had held it opportune to recite a Gospel in the Church of Santa Chiara to which whose who had harmed (tnaleficavit) the oppressed girl had gone? R: It is true that I sang a Passion during Holy Week in that church, and that I told them I had seen those enemies whom they [Laura's family] blamed for making her sick and causing her fattura. I: Whether he had a Vesper said in the Church of San Domenico saying it was necessary to heal the above mentioned sick person because a Vesper had been celebrated in that church in order to cause her maleficiuml R: It is true.4*

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Unfortunately, the surviving records of Zani's trial lack both a final summary of charges and a sentence. Although there is thus no clear statement by the court about exactly where his errors lay, it is clear that the exorcist's zeal for combatting maleficia had extended far beyond the limits of orthodox relief. Whether fraudulent or sincere in motive, his confirmation of Margarita's suspicions about the link between familial hostilities and Laura's condition, as well as the strict parallelism of his undoing the maleficium by the same means used to cause it, could readily be classified as superstitious misuses of liturgical ceremonies. So even if one chose the sacerdote over the strione, there was no guarantee that the choice would result in an orthodox cure. The functional equivalence of orthodox and superstitious remedies asserted in Gasparina's formula indicates that people went to priests with many of the same expectations that they brought to magical healers, creating pressures that these men were often ill-equipped to resist. Moreover, the Church's identification of clerics as an authorized source of relief itself contributed to the demands made upon them. The resulting tensions often led them to expand their healing activities well beyond orthodox boundaries. While the Church expected clerics to perceive clearly and to enforce the jurisdictional line separating superstitious from religiously acceptable techniques, other forces diluted this capacity. Even if a cleric had a fairly solid grasp of the limits of assistance he could legitimately offer, an insistent parishioner could confuse the issues in his mind. Thus Madonna Margarita Simonini of Modena approached her parish priest, Don Camillo Malpiglia, for aid in writing the names of Christ and the twelve Apostles on thirteen almonds; she wished to give them to her son as a cure for fever. Rebuffed by Don Camillo on the grounds that he was too busy, rather than on any stated objection to the procedure, Margarita then turned to Don Teofilo Zani. As he testified, the procedure was a familiar one. Many times I have heard it said in Modena that the sick person was to eat each day, at random, one of those thirteen almonds on which the names were written. When he ate that bearing the name of Christ, the fever would immediately leave.47

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This cure is closely related to the apostolic lottery of Fra Geremia da Udine, though here the role of the Apostles is subordinated to that of Christ and the retribution for nonperformance is eliminated. Whether Margarita's request stemmed from an inability to write these words herself or whether the power of priestly script was an element in the efficacy of the charm is not clear. Zani indignantly denied having consecrated Mass over these almonds, although he did admit to having written the holy names on them. Asked "whether or not he believed in this sort of superstition," Zani explained that he had attempted to keep his distance and had initially refused Margarita's request. But in a striking reversal of the prescribed direction of the lay-clerical relationship, she was able to convince him of the devout and religious content of her healing method. No, Father, I did not believe in it, nor do I believe it now. On the contrary, I resisted this woman's demands, saying I didn't want to write those names. But when she said that she did this for the devotion she bore to the name of Jesus Christ, I let myself be worn down (mi lasciai ridur) and so I wrote those names on the almonds to give her satisfaction. . . . This custom is used by many people, and for these reasons I wrote those names on the almonds, thinking it was a matter of devotion.48

As further evidence that it had indeed been a "matter of devotion," Zani cited Margarita's request that he say the Mass of the Centurion for her son; she had offered the elemosina of one canalotto for this service. There was clearly no question in Margarita's mind that this combination of a devout healing charm and a Mass was appropriate, and the strength of her understanding of what belonged in the sphere of religion was instrumental in overcoming Zani's hesitation. But other statements made by Zani - "so it is said in Modena . . . this custom is used by many people" — indicate that the noncontroversial nature of such methods in the community at large was also at work, eating away at the cleric's ability to categorize such procedure in a correct, orthodox manner. The indelible mark of Holy Orders and the Church's efforts to hold the clergy to stricter standards notwithstanding, individual priests came from and often continued to participate actively in the popular milieux where superstitious remedies were sought after and highly valued. Moreover, the cleric's ac-

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cess to such liturgical apparatus as holy oils, together with his linguistic and ceremonial knowledge, made his cooperation crucial to various magical procedures. The pressures that could be brought to bear on clerics by their unabashed parishioners again emerge in the 1585 trial of Don Gian Battista, a priest in the Cathedral Church of Modena. Asked by a noblewoman to baptize a piece of magnet (calamita) for her use as a love charm, he resisted at first, well aware that this was a sacrilegious misuse of the baptismal ceremony. "But although I had refused her more than ten times, in the end I was obliged by the many importunities of the Signora, and I promised to serve her in this matter."49 The language of service in which his acquiescence is couched and the social importance of the Signora Costanza, wife of Signer Camillo Superechio, cittadino modenese, suggest that Don Gian Battista found it difficult to resist a social superior. While this case illustrates pressures from above, the expectations of social equals and especially of relatives could prove even more compelling. For, unlike Fra Geremia, not all clerics left their provincial birthplace; village priests often continued to function as members of a kinship group even when the demands such a role placed upon them conflicted directly with their role as representatives of orthodoxy.50 Don Camillo Forbicino, curate of the Church of San Matteo in Villa Nova, a rural community in Modenese territory, was called before the Inquisitor in 1594 for having requested a local seer to perform a magical procedure aimed at finding a relative's stolen property. He described a situation in which his familial position forced him to prove his innocence of theft by consenting to superstition. A store of sausage had been stolen from Don Camillo's aunt: since I took care of my aunt's affairs, she told several people, in the presence of my mother, that no one was familiar with her house except me, so that suspicions focused on me. When she told me that she wanted to draw lots (tirar le sorte) to identify the thief, I put up some resistance, reminding her that it was a sin. Still I could not really oppose her, lest she then become certain that I had stolen these things.51

This priest's close involvement with his female relatives implicated him in a traditional method of detecting theft; despite his show

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of resistance, their sense of how to proceed overrode his mild clerical scruples. Alert to his predicament, the court displayed a certain protectiveness for this cleric caught in a web of rustic female error, asking solicitously whether "the above named women forced him into doing this through sorcery?" To his credit, Don Camillo did not avail himself of this classic opportunity to transfer blame. Though finding him guilty, the court noted that his error derived "not from lack of faith, but from the requests of others and for your own honor."52 The close ties between the village priest and the people were thus recognized, though certainly not approved, by the 16th century enforcers of orthodoxy. While Don Gian Battista and Don Camillo were aware of being drawn into explicitly superstitious remedies (love magic and divination), the cases of Fra Geremia and Don Teofilo Zani suggest that clerics' own sense of the limits of orthodox assistance was often unsure and conflicted with other assumptions operative in their environment. If the laity viewed the functions of the sacerdote as continuous with those of the strione, so did some clerics. An extreme case of the functional equivalence of orthodox and magical remedies is found in the trial of a Franciscan Tertiary in Modena in 1599. Fra Girolamo Azzolini, "who makes a profession of exorcizing and of telling who had been bewitched," was commonly consulted for information about whether a given sickness was of maleficial origin and victims of maleflcium were brought to him to be blessed (segnati). The court's summary of his trial focused on his reply to a woman who brought her sick child (creatura guasta) to him for this purpose. 'My lady, this child of yours is bewitched (striata) and I cannot heal her. If you want her cured you must take her to a witch (strega) so that she can look at her and free her.' When the woman replied that she didn't know any witches, Fra Azzolini added, 'Go to Villa Franca, to such and such a person, and tell her on my behalf that she should cure this child of yours, and she will do it.'53

Thus the central accusation against Fra Azzolini was that of "having commerce with a witch" by referring a trusting Christian soul to an implicitly diabolical source of relief. Aware of the limits of his own healing powers, he acknowledged the superior abilities of a local healer (here called Strega) and sent serious cases to her.

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Though Fra Azzolini admitted having given this advice, he was reticent about the circumstances in which he had made his acquaintance with this Strega. Not until his third interrogation did he explain that his relatives had sent for the "old woman who may have been a witch" during his own recent illness (italics added). But when she arrived and learned for what purpose she had been called, she refused to heal him, saying that her confessor no longer wanted to absolve her when she did such things. To which you [Fra Azzolini] replied that since she had performed this remedy before, and had been absolved, you could assure her that she would be absolved again. Encouraged by your words, she signed you with her superstitious remedy.54

After his recovery, Fra Azzolini had taken to sending people with an illness similar to his to this woman, although "being a religious, I was ashamed to have done this." All the parties to this procedure were thus aware that it was forbidden "to call for witches in one's own infirmity and to make use of their superstitious secrets and remedies."55 But under the duress of illness such recourse remained a culturally valid option, even when the Church's prohibitions were fully understood. Fra Azzolini's case was treated with severity by the court, both because of the "seriousness of the crimes to which you have confessed and especially because of the quality of your person and of the office of exorcist exercised by you." For a specialist in ecclesiastical medicine to send his clients to a Strega, acknowledging the relative deficiency of his own powers, constituted propaganda in favor of the opposition and clear evidence of his unworthiness to hold the office. Fra Azzolini was duly condemned to exile from the city of Modena and ordered "under pain of ipso facto suspension from holy orders, that you should never again exercise the office of exorcist."56 While reciprocity between lay and clerical healers was possible, competition between them was more common and certainly more orthodox. In 1600, Gasparino da Carpo called on a Modenese Dominican, Fra Benedetto, because he suspected that his wife Madalena had been affatturata. The friar, "having seen and blessed (segnata) Madalena three times, confirmed that she was guasta and amaliata." This recourse to ecclesiastical healing power angered a local woman who had often boasted of knowing various secret remedies of her own.

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Having learned that my wife had come to have herself signed by Fra Benedetto, Hippolita arrived at our house and said these or similar words to my wife: 'Why have you not allowed me to heal? Didn't you think I could heal you without going to the friar of San Domenico?'57

Protecting her territory and her healing function from the intrusion of an orthodox clerical healer, Hippolita was seen by Gasparino as practically announcing herself as the cause of his wife's illness. For on the principle that qui seit sanare, seit damnare, healers were commonly suspected of inducing the very symptoms they offered to cure.58 Hippolita was in fact denounced to the Inquisition as a malefica on the basis of this incident. The perception that the power to heal implied its opposite has been noted in various areas of Europe in this period; in the Modenese trials it is first invoked by witnesses testifying against healers and may therefore be of popular origin.59 In the 1579 trial of Maria de Mariani, various former clients cited her healing abilities as evidence against her. Asked an cognoscat aliquam maleficam? one witness replied carefully: Father, I don't know any malefica or stria, but I do know well a woman named Maria de Mariani, a widow who lives in the Villa di Fre and is held to be a stria though she denies it. I have heard Maria say that she has healed and restored more children than she has hairs on her head, and it is commonly said that those who know how to heal know how to harm. . . . si dice communemente ehe quelli ehe li sano conzare li sano anco guastare.60

Presented here as everyday common knowledge, the principle was also incorporated into learned analyses of the same phenomenon. The theological category used to describe superstitious lay healing — maleficia ad sananda — succinctly expresses this ambivalence.61 Learned discussions of the legitimacy of lay healing were thus included in the question of "whether it is permissible to remove a maleficium by means of another maleficium" for, though such healing was prohibited as implicitly diabolical, its efficacy was nonetheless recognized.62 The pressures that these alternative remedies created led to clerical toleration of their use in certain instances, despite their illicit nature. But unlike the situation described by Delcambre in Lorraine, where recourse to a priest annulled the therapeutic powers of the malefica, drastic mutual exclusiveness of lay and clerical healing is not present in the Modenese setting.63 The dominant tone is rather one of competitive antagonism like that

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present in the case of Thomaso Salani, who called in Don Giacomo Bernardo Lamburano to deal with his violent illness. When Ludovica Guardasone learned that the priest had come to conjure (scongiurare) me, she went to his house, bringing him a garland of onions, entreating him to do no more for me. She also confessed that she had bewitched me ... but that little by little she should heal me. The Reverend Father answered that she should heal me, otherwise he would find another remedy.64

In fact Ludovica's visit may have been as much defensive as competitive in tone, for the vaguely menacing tone of Don Giacomo's reply indicates his intention to have her denounced to the Inquisition — as he later did. Although the Church's delegation of powers against maleficia to clerics gave priestly healing a solid orthodox basis, certain accusations against exorcists bear a striking resemblance to those arising from the ambivalence of lay healing powers. Testimony against Don Teofilo Zani included allegations of causing the death of an elderly patient by administering hellebore and unconsecrated hosts during a sick-bed exorcism.65 Since this was done against medical advice the physician in the case, named Arlotto, attempted to have Zani tried by the Bishop of Reggio, where the patient, Alessandro Pattacio, had been a prominent citizen. Though Zani was able to justify his intervention to the Bishop, suspicions about him continued to mount within the family. The original idea that Zani had inadvertently provoked Pattacio's death began to shift to the more sinister interpretation that he had caused the death by occult means. When the physician Arlotto himself became sick shortly thereafter, the cause was clear to him. His widow later testified that "her husband had been guasto by Don Teofilo, and on these charges he denounced him to the Bishopric" before his own death, which resulted from his maleficial condition.66 A fundamental ambivalence thus adhered to the perception of the exorcist and underlay his transition from a healer of maleficia to a suspected perpetrator. Charges against Fra Girolamo Azzolini in 1599 included similar allegations that he h&aguastato a young girl whom he was later called to heal.67 Why were exorcists so easily suspect of causing the conditions they should have cured? The trial of Fra Basileo da Parma in 1584 is illuminating. Formerly prior of the Carmelite convent in Sabbioneta, Fra

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Basileo had been banned by city officials from exorcizing in Venice. Relicensed by his superiors in Bologna, he continued to exorcize until his ill-advised boasting about his prowess with women resulted in his denunciation to the Inquisition. His accuser, a scandalized Capuchin, testified: He told me that when he was in Parma hardly a day passed that he did not commit some sin with a woman, and that this did not at all prevent his exorcizing, since he knew secrets through which the spirits had of necessity to obey him.**

The idea that the moral state of the practitioner might limit his ability to deal with demons was not Donatist in its implications, for exorcism was not a sacrament and did not achieve its effects ex opere operato. Relating its efficacy to the exorcist's personal morality was therefore theologically justified and reformers like Menghi placed great emphasis on this point.69 The Capuchin's fear that it was through "some superstition that these marvels were done" was echoed by Basileo's superior in the Carmelite convent in Bologna, Aurelio da Crema: I know that he is famous for expelling spirits, but what seems amazing to myself and to others in our convent is that this Fra Basileo is ignorant and leads a rather low life. Nonetheless wherever he goes, though there may have been no rumor of spirits, as soon as he shows up, cities and villages begin to move, and many possessed persons (spiritati) are discovered. At times it has been wondered if he has some Key of Solomon or pact with the demon or some other special secret for discovering spirits. . . . especially since he himself has said . . . that with a word spoken in the ear of the spiritati, he can uncover spirits. This generates a certain suspicion of evil.70

Aurelio's doubts express the recurrent suspicion that such famous and successful exorcists were in league with the very demons they purported to expel, inducing them to enter a person so profits and reputation could be generated through their expulsion. If the specialists in controlling the demonic should be suspect of complicity with the enemy, the central orthodox remedy against negative supernatural forces would be severely undermined. Accusations and implications of this sort reflect the deep mistrust aroused by the exorcists' close contact with demons and by their control over demons in the exorcist ritual. The close parallel with the common charge of witchcraft against lay

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healers shows that the principle of qui seit sanare, seit damnare could be easily extended to clerics. Contact with the supernatural, even when specifically remedial in intent, was, perforce, dangerous to orthodox and independent practitioners alike. To avoid such damaging suspicions, exorcist manuals such as those by Girolamo Menghi, the prolific Franciscan expert, established guidelines for interacting with demons and above all warned against even the appearance of "familiarity or fraternization" with them.71 For abuses of exorcism like those of Fra Basileo created opposition and even calls for its suppression by critics and skeptics, the "enemies of adjuration." But discerning observers like Menghi understood that the source of such a suggestion, as of the abuses themselves, lay in the demons' fear of exorcism, which led them to devote much of their energy to combatting this potent ecclesiastical remedy. Through the services of his assistants, who unfairly and impiously usurp the name of exorcist, instigated to do that which no other Christian would agree to do, the Demon manages to disgrace and tries to destroy the practice of adjuration itself.72

The implication that many exorcists are indeed servants of the demon, if not demons in disguise, is striking in a militant defender of exorcism; but the clear message is that this demonic ploy must be thwarted by carrying on with the task, as Menghi himself did during his long exorcist career.73 The protection of orthodox remedies therefore demanded the reform of exorcism, carried out through trials against abusive and superstitious exorcists, on the one hand, and through better preparation and stricter licensing of the average exorcist, on the other. All exorcists were to be approved by the episcopal authorities of the area in which they operated; a rigorously reforming prelate like Cardinal Federigo Borromeo granted exorcist authorization to no more than "four or six men of conspicuous piety and learning" for the whole large diocese of Milan.74 The various exorcist manuals written by Menghi between 1555 and 1595, from the vernacular Compendia deII'arte essorcista through the Flagellum Daemonum, Fustis Daemonum, and Fuga Daemonum, were directed specifically at practitioners in the field and against the errors and abuses associated with exorcism.75

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Evidence that Menghi's manuals reached the marginally educated exorcists for whom they were intended is provided by the Inquisition's trials against exorcists. When called before the court, the exorcist could use the basic defense that he had only acted, as Fra Basileo da Parma testified, "according to the rules set forth in the printed books of this art."76 And in every such case, the books cited by exorcists on trial were those of Girolamo Menghi; many of the accused arrived in court with the Flagellum in hand, hoping that this would suffice to convince the judges of their orthodoxy. In some cases it did. Don Bartolomeo, a Celestine friar and formerly a licensed exorcist, was able to defend the orthodoxy of the brevi that he had dispensed to heal victims of maleficial illness by explaining that he had "taken them from this book which I have brought with me to show Your Reverences."77 The court duly noted that the title of the book in question was the Flagellum Daemonum, bound in the same volume as the Fustis Daemonum. A search of the friar's room turned up a copy of the Italian Compendia, which he had left behind when called to Modena, thus giving indirect testimony to his perception of the superior authority of the Latin version. Similarly, Don Teofilo Zani defended his practice of administering both hellebore and unconsecrated hosts during routine exorcisms of the sick by citing not only Menghi but personal Inquisitorial approval of his use of Menghi's works. I did not consecrate those hosts which I customarily gave to the sick who were in my care, but rather I blessed the hosts in the manner taught in the book Flagellum Daemonum, the book from which I learned the art of exorcizing. I showed this book to the Inquisitor of Ferrara; His Reverence approved it as good and gave me permission to keep it. ... I neither add nor delete in the office of exorcizing from that which the books teach.78

Accused of deviating from normal exorcist procedures, Zani simply cited the authorized text and asserted the identity of the ritual as prescribed and as performed, extending the authoritative repeatability of the printed work from the page to the realm of action.79 However, the other charges against Zani, which included sexual misconduct, performing an exorcism while dressed in Carneval costume (as a gypsy), and causing the death of Alessandro Pattacio by acting against medical advice, provide a textbook case of the pattern of abuses that Menghi denounced.

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Finding his books in the hands of exorcists whose unorthodox practices and immoral lives were similar to those he had denounced is certainly an ambiguous compliment to Menghi's work. But despite the many examples of superstitious and charlatan exorcists presented in his last work, the Fuga Daemonum of 1595, Menghi remained optimistic that the trend of events favored the enforcement of orthodoxy. In these days, there are few superstitious exorcists to be found, for by the grace of God and through the vigilance of pastors and Inquisitors, they have no place except in the galleys or in perpetual prison.80

Menghi's self-satisfied judgment was somewhat premature, for problems in the practice of exorcism and trials for superstition against exorcists continued throughout the 17th century. In 1636, for example, the Sacred Congregation at Rome instructed local Inquisitors to issue edicts directed against the "many disorders that continually arise in exorcisms, which many perform with little knowledge and less prudence."81 What do these Inquisitorial records contribute to a study of popular culture in the 16th century? The existence of parallel and competing remedies to fundamental problems of everyday life is one indication of the tensions between cultural levels in early modern society. At the same time, the identity of purpose and the structural similarities shared by orthodox and superstitious remedies indicate that these alternatives existed within the same universe rather than deriving from fundamentally antagonistic world views. These trials demonstrate the pivotal position of the lower clergy in mediating between popular demands and the requirements of orthodoxy. As the local representatives of the Roman Church, the clergy should have constituted the primary barrier against rustic error. But the line between orthodox and popular cultures, if such a line can be drawn, cut through the biographies, personalities, and experience of these men. Their individual transitions between culture folklorique and culture clericale led them inevitably to improvisations and compromises that, creative though they may have been, were unacceptable to the Church. No reform of popular culture was therefore possible without a corresponding reform of the clergy in general and of exorcists in particular.82

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The efforts of the Tridentine Church to erect secure boundaries between clergy and laity, or between religion and superstition, aimed to define and control an often resistant social reality. But the complexity and multiplicity of that reality meant that these ultimately jurisdictional efforts resulted not in achieved cultural facts but in an ongoing historical process to which the records of these trials bear witness.

NOTES 1. The pejorative orthodox categories of "ignorance and superstition" were used on both sides of the 16th century schism with social as well as doctrinal connotations. For the Protestant version, see Jean Delumeau, "Les reformateurs et la superstition," in Actes du colloque I'Admiralde Coligny et son temps, Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Franqais (Paris: 1972), pp. 451-87. More neutral language to describe this campaign is proposed by Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: 1978), pp. 207—43; his phrase, the "reform of popular culture," remains useful despite the ambiguities of each of its terms. Discussing similar difficulties inherent in the phrase "popular religion," J.-C. Schmitt has urged that historians avoid such ambiguities by enumerating "in every case the social categories of which [they] speak and the precise nature of the "cultural levels" by historians is based on the recognition that the distinctions to be made are multiple and contextually varied. This paper, Assumptions that cultural influences proceed unidirectionally or that the "people" represent a unified social or cultural entity are to be avoided; these points are stressed by Carlo Ginzburg in his introduction to Le religioni delle classi popolari, a special edition of Quaderni storici, An. XIV, No. 41 (1979), pp. 393-97. The increasing use of the plural "cultural levels" by historians is based on the recognition that the distinctions to be made are multiple and contextually varied. This paper, which examines the ambiguous position of the lower clergy in the reform of popular beliefs, is intended as a contribution to this ongoing discussion. 2. The Protestant rejection of the "magic of the medieval Church" is a central theme of Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: 1971). The problems encountered by Lutheran reformers in their efforts to suppress magical beliefs are discussed by Gerald Strauss in "Success and Failure in the German Reformation," Past and Present 67 (1975), pp. 30—63, and in Luther's House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore: 1978). Analogous Catholic efforts in the period following the Council of Trent are

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

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described as a program of "Christianization" by Jean Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris: 1971). The Catholic definition of superstition at the Council of Malines in 1607 reflects the desire to achieve an ecclesiastical monopoly on supernatural effects: "It is superstitious to expect any effect from anything when such an effect cannot be produced by natural causes, by divine institution, or by the ordination and approval of the Church." Quoted by Thomas, Religion, p. 49, from Jean-Baptist Thiers, Traiti des Superstitions qui regardent lesSacramens (1679) 5th ed. (Paris: 1741), Vol. 2, p. i . " Maleficium refers to any harm done by occult means; it is the basic Latin term used throughout Europe for describing the effects of witchcraft. For a discussion of this concept in the middle ages see Norman Conn, Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch Hunt (New York: 1975), pp. 147-63. A malefica is a female perpetrator of maleficial deeds (a witch). Girolamo Menghi, O.F.M., Compendia dell'arte essorcista e possibilita delle mirabili e stupende operationi delli demoni e dei malefici con i rimedii opportuni all'infirmita maleficiali (Bologna: 1578). For the skeptics, see below, note 7. Menghi, Compendia, p. 225. For a review of the medieval polemic against curiositas, the vice of intellectuals, see Christian K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth Century England (Baltimore: 1976), pp. 18-41. For biographical information on Menghi, see the Dictionnaire de Theologie Catholique, Vol. 10, pt. 1 (Paris: 1928), pp. 550-51, which cites the various Franciscan sources. Born in 1529, Menghi entered the Franciscan order in 1550, published his first exorcist work in 1555, practiced his art in Venice, Bologna, and Lombardy, and died in his home town of Viadana in 1609. The inscription on his tombstone there relates the "joy of the infernal hosts" at the death of their "most rigorous assailant" and describes him as the greatest exorcist of his century. The text is given in full by Melchiorri de Cerreto, O.F.M., Annales Minorum seu Trium Ordinum a S. Francisco Institutorum, vol. 24: 1601-1611 (Florence: 1934), pp. 304-5. It is not clear exactly who the "curiosi et elevanti intelletti" are, but the arguments attributed to them are similar to those of Pomponazzi in De naturalium effectuum causis sive de Incantationibus. Although manuscript copies circulated in Italy from the 1520s on, this work was only published in Basel in 1556 under Protestant auspices. It is, however, possible that Menghi was aware of Pomponazzi's attack on traditional demonology. For Menghi's list of the medicine ecclesiastic he, see Compendia, p. 253. On these trials, see my "Discerning Superstition: Popular Errors and Orthodox Response in Late Sixteenth Century Italy" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1982). For an examination of similar offenses earlier in the century, see Albano Biondi, "Streghe ed eretici nei domini estensi alTepoca dell'Ariosto," in II Rinascimento nelle cortipadane (Bari: 1977), pp. 165-98.

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10. Canon 12 of Alcune cose per memoria dei Reverendi Curati di Bologna, tratte nelle Congregazione fatta in Vescovado alii 24 d'ottobre 1577, in Stabilimenti e Dichiarazione delli Congregationi annuali dei R. R. Arcipreti, Pievani e Vicari Foranei (Bologna: 1577), quoted in Cleto Corrain and Pier-Luigi Zampini, Documenti etnografici e folkloristici nei sinodi diocesani italiani (Bologna: 1970), p. 36. 11. The requirement of reporting on superstitious or magical activity is outlined in a Bolognese Inquisitorial Edict of 1636, which states: "Si raccorda a tutti li fedeli l'obligo ehe hanno sotto pena di scommunica riservata, di revelare e notificare giuridicamente al S. Officio (e non con bollettini, ο lettere senza nomi) tutti quelli ehe sanno, hanno saputo, conoscono ο hanno conosciuto o conosceranno, ehe siano heretici, ο sospetti d'heresia, negromantia, ehe faccino o habbino fatti incanti, stregarie, maleficii, sortilegi e sperimenti magicio negromantia, come di tirar fave, far martelli con allume di rocco, sale, piombo, e pignattini con cuori d'animali nel fuoco, misurare ο spannare il braccio, tirar le sorti, et altre simili, specialmente con l'invocazione de Demoni esplicitamente ο implicitamente" (Aviso della Santa Inquisizione de Bologna, 4 March 1636, Biblioteca Communale di Bologna [BCB], ms B1891, f. 119). It is clear from trial testimony referring to similar edicts that they were issued from at least the 1580s on. 12. The phrase "pusillis et rudibus" recurs in official documents referring to the uneducated lower orders of society. See for instance the papal bull of 1571 on the reform of the Office of the Blessed Virgin, "Officii B. Mariae nuper reformat!," Pius V, An. VI, Magnum Bullarium Romanum 4, pt. 3 (Austria: 1965), p. 153. 13. These figures are based on the trials preserved in the Fondo dell'Inquisizione, Archivio di Stato di Modena (ASM). This fondo was renumbered in 1983; references given here use the new numbering system. 14. The surviving but fragmentary records of the Bolognese Holy Office are preserved in the manuscript collection of the Biblioteca Communale di Bologna (BCB). The intact Venetian Inquisition records are in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV), Fondo del Sant'Uffizio. 15. These categories have been elaborated by Jacques Le Goff in "Culture clericale et traditions folkloriques dans la civilisation merovingienne," Annales: E.S.C. (1967), pp. 780-91, and in "Culture ecclesiastique et culture folklorique au Moyen Age: Saint Marcel de Paris et le Dragon," in Ricerche storiche ed economiche in memoria di Corrado Barbagallo, ed. L. De Rosa, vol. 2 (Naples: 1970), pp. 51-90. Both are now available in J. Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: 1980). An argument supporting the use of these categories is made by Schmitt, " 'Religion populaire' et culture folklorique," pp. 941-53. 16. Trial of Antonio de Correggi, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 9, f.i, 1595. 17. For a similar concept of sin in 14th century France, see Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (New York: 1978), pp. 327ff.

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18. Trial of Fra Geremia da Udine, ASV, Sant'Uffizio, b. 66, 1590. Choosing among various saints by lot was traditional in Western Europe; it was not necessarily an unorthodox procedure, for when performed with proper reverence it represented an appeal to divine judgment. For its use in Spain, see William A. Christian Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain (Princeton: 1981), pp. 47-53; for similar practices in medieval England, see Ronald Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London: 1977), pp. 63—85. 19. Trial of Fra Geremia da Udine, ASV, Sant'Uffizio, b. 66, 1590. 20. Opinion was surprisingly divided on this issue; witch hunters, in their zeal to ferret out witches, tolerated a wide array of superstitious remedies most of which were mechanisms for detecting witches and forcing them to undo their spells; for a discussion of the permissible range of "Methods of Curing and Destroying Witchcraft," see Part II, Question 2 of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficantm, English translation by Montague Summers (New York, 1971), pp. 155-64. Menghi's Compendia discusses the same issue in Book III, chap. 2, "Of remedies in general: that is, how one can undo and dissolve maleficia, and whether it is permitted to true Christians to destroy them by means of further maleficia," pp. 236ff., where he takes a much harder line against superstitious remedies. This opposition is, of course, motivated by the assumption that all nonecclesiastical remedies are implicitly diabolical. 21. Trial of Fra Geremia da Udine, ASV, Sant'Uffizio, b. 66, 1590. 22. Ibid. 23. A systematic survey of the evolution of the category of superstition in medieval theological and canon law literature has been undertaken by Dieter Harmening, Superstitio: Überlieferungs- und theoriegeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur kirchlich-theologischen Aberglaubensliteratur des Mittelalters (Berlin: 1979). For discussions of the modern meaning of the term, see Giuseppe Cochiara, Sul concetto della superstitione (Palermo: 1940), and Gustav Jahoda, The Psychology of Superstition (London: 1969). 24. Trial of Fra Geremia da Udine, ASV, Sant'Uffizio, b. 66, 1590. 25. On the principles underlying magical actions, see Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (New York: 1972). 26. Trial of Fra Geremia da Udine, ASV, Sant'Uffizio, b. 66, 1590. 27. The popular beliefs systems of Friuli, the province of Fra Geremia's origin, are depicted in the works of Carlo Ginzburg, / benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento (Turin: 1966) and II formaggio ed i vermi: II cosmo di un mugnaio del Cinquecento (Turin: 1976). 28. Trial of Fra Geremia da Udine, ASV, Sant'Uffizio, b. 66, 1590. His sentence of 17 October required him to fast and recite psalms on feast days for a year and to perform private penances, including la disciplina. His trial is particularly interesting for the information it provides, not so much on the abstract content of the category "superstition" but

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29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

Mary R. O'Neil about the process by which superstition was detected and defined in a specific case. Indeed, the charges against Antonio de Correggi included "lack of reverence for the holy things," including brevi, contained in a small sack which he removed from the neck of a sick child during his healing procedure: ASM, Inquisizione, b. 9, f. i, 1595. A case in which a cleric was able to demonstrate the orthodoxy of the brevi he dispensed is discussed below, note 77. On exorcism as Counter-Reformation propaganda in 16th century France, see D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: 1981). Among Menghi's requirements for the office of exorcist was the ability to tell natural from maleficial symptoms. The techniques are described in his Fuga Daemonum (Venice: 1596), Cap. XII, "De modo quo infirmitates maleficiales cognoscuntur et signis ad hoc pertinentibus," p. 59r. Ibid.,p.49v. Trial of Don Teofilo Zani, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 8, f.i, testimony of 21 May 1582,f. 21r. Ibid., testimony of 1 June 1582, f. 24r-v. Ibid., testimony of 23 May 1582, f. 21r. It should be noted that the family in question was representative of the upper levels of Modenese society. The Livizzano were wealthy bankers and merchants whose members occupied important local positions in both secular and ecclesiastical life throughout the 16th century. See Susanna Peyronel Rambaldi, Speranze e crisi nel Cinquecento modenese: Tensioni religiose e vita cittadina ai tempi di Giovanni Morone (Milan: 1979), pp. 102, 162. Trial of Don Teofilo Zani, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 8, f.i, testimony of Gasparina Ballotta, 16 October 1582, f. 14r: "Mi apparve un'altra volta con gran splendore in effigie di sua Madre, cioe di Madonna Caterina, et mi disse, 'Che vuoi tu da me, ehe cosa domandi?' 'Vorei sapere se gli e rimedio aH'infirmita 'di Madonna Laura, sia di strione hover di sacerdote, et questo m'a detto Madonna Zia ehe io vi adimandi.' Mi ripose lei ehe non gli voleva strioni ma ministri di Christo. Et essendo proposto un Don Teofilo dal Padre Desiderio a mia Zia, lei mi disse ch'io dovessi interrogar la vision se era al proposito, et mi rispose ehe si, se lui faceva 1'opra per charitä." Ibid., testimony of Gasparina Ballotta, 16 October 1582, f. 15r. Ibid., testimony of Don Teofilo Zani, 8 September 1582, f. 31r. Ibid., testimony of Gasparina Ballotta, 16 October 1582, f. 15r: "Madonna Margarita una volta mi disse ehe io gli adimandasse se lei era stata guasta da sua Madonna o da suoi cugnati, et ancora da loro sera stato guaste le sue figliole come lei prosupponeva ehe fusse vero, et apparendomi [la visione] mi disse, 'Che cosa vuoi? Mia figliola, e sulle anime e sul far de peccati, ehe attendi lesu Christo.' " Trial of Maria de Mariani, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 7, f.i, 1579.

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42. On the inverse correlation between witch hunting and exorcism, see Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 70-77 and 493-501. The question of the validity of this correlation in Catholic countries, where exorcism and witch hunting coexisted, emerged during a roundtable discussion held at Vicenza in 1976 on the theme of "Religione e religiosita popolare," the proceedings of which are collected in Ricerche di storia sociale e religiosa, n.s., 6, no. 11 (January — June 1977), pp. 5—205. Carlo Ginzburg, though doubtful of the applicability of Thomas's formula outside England, stressed the need for comparative studies to deal with this issue (p. 175). It would be possible to argue that the relative infrequency of witch trials in Italy, as compared with the contemporary "witch panic" in northern Europe, is related to the reinforcement of exorcism as an orthodox remedy. 43. Lucy Mair's account of the general structure of witch beliefs and their function as an explanation for misfortune sees the need to identify a known person as basic to African witch beliefs; see Mair, Witchcraft (New York: 1970). 44. Trial of Don Teofilo Zani, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 8, f.i, testimony of Margarita Livizzano, 29 June 1581, f. 7r. There is confirming testimony about these events by Gasparina on 16 October 1582, f. 16r. 45. Ibid., testimony of Gasparina, 16 October 1582, f. 16r. 46. Ibid., testimony of Don Teofilo Zani, 18 October 1582, f. 18r. 47. Ibid., testimony of Don Teofilo Zani, 28 April 1582, f. 14r. 48. Ibid., testimony of 29 April 1582, f. 1 Ir. 49. Trial of Don Gian Battista, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 8, f.i, 1585. The use of the calamita baptizata, as of other love charms, was most often associated with prostitutes; Don Gian Battista was won over in part by the Signora's assurance that she only wanted the magnet to shore up the marital bond, rather than for any illicit purposes. This case is discussed by Luciano Allegra, in "II parroco: un mediatore fra alta e bassa cultura," Storia d'ltalia Einaudi, Annali, Vol. 4 (Turin, 1981), pp. 899900, an important article which came to my attention only after the present paper had been written. 50. The now classic figure of the village priest as head of a kinship network is Pierre Clergue of Montaillou, as portrayed by Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, pp. 53ff and passim. 51. Trial of Don Camillo Forbicino, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 8, f.ii, 1594, testimony of 6 May 1594. 52. Ibid. Found to be "sospetto leggiermente d'apostasia da Dio al Diavolo" for his participation in this superstition, Don Camillo's sentence required recitation of litanies and psalms each month for a year, and of a Rosary each Friday for the same year. He was also suspended a divinis for one month and required to pay all the expenses of his trial (Sentence dated 18 June 1594). 53. Trial of Fra Girolamo Azzolini, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 8, testimony of Madonna Genevra Buoncuggino, 25 August 1599 (in court's summary).

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54. Ibid., summary of trial included with sentence of 9 March 1600. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., sentence of 9 May 1600; a note appended to the trial records dated 17 December 1604 indicates that Fra Girolamo Azzolini was granted permission to return to Modena after five years in exile. 57. Trial of Hippolita de Figarolo and Bernardina de Forli, 1600, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 11. 58. Such a principle had long been recognized in Modena; one of the earliest surviving trials of 1499 includes an identical statement, qui seit sanare, seit destruere, made by a witness in a case of maleficium. This case is discussed by Ginzburg, / benandanti, pp. 116—17; he notes similar principles in trials from Lucca. 59. In his study of Jura witch beliefs, E. William Monter has stressed this point, placing the initiative for the equation of healing and harming with the peasantry and arguing that the demonologists learned it from them: Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca: 1976), p. 179. 60. Trial of Maria de Mariani, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 7 f.i, 1579, testimony of Andreas di Saviolis. 61. One example of the usage of this term in the 17th century by the Inquisition: "Di piu avvertano i Giudici, ehe quantunque alcuna donna resti convinta confessa d'haver fatta incanti . . . o vero ad sananda maleficia o a quäl si voglia altro effetto, non segue pero necessariamente ehe ella sia Strega formale, potendo il sortilegio farsi senza formale apostasi al Demonio"; in Eliseo Masini, Sacra Arsenale, overo Prattica dell'Officio della S. Inquisitione ampliata (Rome: 1639), p. 178. 62. For discussion of this issue by Kramer and Sprenger and by Menghi, see above, note 20. 63. "Cette mSme vertu therapeutique etait en outre suspendue . . . si le malade avait re$u la visite du pretre ou du medecin ou avait ete administre," Etienne Delcambre, Les Devins-guorisseurs, Vol. 3 of Le concept de la sorcellerie dans le Duche de Lorraine au XVI et au XVII siede (Nancy: 1951) p. 207. 64. Trial of Ludovica Guardasone, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 8, f.i, 1589. 65. Hellebore was the name given to a group of plants considered medically effective both for mental disease and for maleficial conditions. 66. These allegations are included in the trial of Don Teofilo Zani, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 8, f.i, testimony of Beatrice Pattacio and Cambius Cambiator, May 1582. 67. Trial of Fra Girolamo Azzolini, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 9, 1599, testimony of Genevra Buoncuggino, 25 August 1599. 68. Trial of Fra Basileo da Parma, BCB, ms B1877, processo 6, 1584, testimony of Fra Angelo da Bologna. Italics in original. 69. The "first condition" listed by Menghi for an exorcist's efficacy is "goodness of life, that is that he not be in a state of mortal sin." The full twelve conditions are described in Fuga Daemonum, Cap. V, pp. 18r-23r.

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70. Trial of Fra Basileo da Parma, BCB, ms B1877, processo 6, 1584, testimony of R. M. Aurelio da Crema. 71. Menghi, Compendia dell'arte essorcista, p. 20. 72. Menghi, Fuga Daemonum, p. 47v. 73. For biographical information on Menghi, see above, note 6. 74. The conditions required for lawful exercise of the exorcist office are summarized by Menghi, Fuga Daemonum, Cap. V, pp. 18ff. On Borromeo, see Cesare Carena, Tractatus de Officio Sanctissimae Inquisitione, et modo procedendi in causis fidei (Cremona: 1636), p. 494. 75. For a brief survey of the Italian exorcist literature, see Massimo Petrocchi, Esorcismi e magia nell'Italia del Cinquecento e del Seicento (Naples: 1951). The various works of Menghi are also outlined by Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 6 (New York: 1941), pp. 556-59. 76. Trial of Basileo da Parma, BCB, ms B1877, processo 6, 1584. 77. Trial of Don Bartolomeo, Fratre Celestini, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 9, testimony of 20 February 1599. 78. Trial of Don Teofilo Zani, ASM, Inquisizione, b. 8, f.i, testimony of 28 August 1582, ff. 26v-27r. 79. Despite his protestations of fidelity to Menghi, Zani clearly missed some points, especially those warning exorcists against practicing medicine or interfering with physicians. Given the difficulty of finding evidence on how books were read and perceived, the appeal to Menghi by exorcists on trial is important evidence of the ways in which a practical manual was actually used. Some of the problems associated with how books were read are considered by Carlo Ginzburg, // formaggio ed i vermi, pp. 33-61. 80. Menghi, Fuga Daemonum, p. 53r. Besides being overly optimistic, this conclusion is exaggerated; the most serious penalty imposed in any of these trials was that against Fra Azzolini, exiled from Modena and stripped of the order of exorcist. Fra Basileo's trial records unfortunately contain no sentence; he was subjected to extensive torture because of the "lack of verisimilitude" in much of his defense. 81. Form letter to the vicars of the Modenese Inquisition, 1636; ASM, Inquisizione, b. 277-78, Miscellanea. 82. The Tridentine model of a reformed clergy is outlined by G. G. Meersseman, O.P., "II tipo ideale di parroco secondo la riforma tridentina nelle sue fonti letterarie," // concilia di Trento e la riforma tridentina, vol. 1 (Rome: 1965), pp. 27-44; for the decrees concerning the reform, see H. J. Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (St. Louis: 1951).

Popular Culture? Witches, Magistrates, and Divines in Early Modern England

CLIVE HOLMES

A decade ago the publication of two works fundamentally reoriented the study of witchcraft in early modern England.1 Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas rescued a subject that had been treated at best as a branch of old-style intellectual history, revealing the progressive triumph of liberal rationalism over gross superstition. Macfarlane and Thomas sought to locate the phenomenon in its social context. They argued, both from the chronology of prosecution and from detailed analysis of the trials, that witchcraft accusations were a response to the disruption of the traditional communal values of village societies by the rapid social changes that wracked early modern England.2 Witchcraft was central to social experience; it could no longer be dismissed as a peripheral aberration. Macfarlane and Thomas's innovatory studies were greeted with deserved enthusiasm but there were some friendly critics. The misgivings expressed in reviews of Thomas's work by two of the latter, Hildred Geertz and E. P. Thompson, raise the issue of the interrelationship of popular and elite culture.3 Thomas, both critics argued, had produced a simplified, reductionist account of popular culture. He had chosen to treat popular beliefs and practices in general, and thus witchcraft in particular, as "specific, incoherent, and primarily oriented towards practical solutions to immediate problems." Thomas had

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not considered that popular culture might be as coherent and comprehensive as that of the elite: an independent system of belief, entailing "a consistent structure of feeling, a whole way of apprehending the world."4 Geertz was content to postulate the existence of two alternative but equally coherent "cognitive maps" and to demand equal time for the popular cosmology. The historian, she argued, must seek to comprehend the "unarticulated view of reality," the "hidden conceptual foundation" that made sense of the various epiphenomena - "diagnoses, prescriptions, recipes" — that Thomas had studied as isolated and fragmentary. Thompson insisted additionally on the need to introduce a class dimension, to see popular beliefs as an "anticulture" forged in deliberate opposition to the ideology of the elite, thus raising the problem of the relationship between the two systems.5 These, then, were the challenges posed by Thomas's most acute critics: to excavate the mental structures that underlie the fragmentary manifestations of popular culture and to analyze the interaction between popular and elite belief. They drive us back to the sources upon which our knowledge of English witchcraft depends: to the records of the judicial system and pamphlets generated by the trials, to the tracts of the theologians and the polemics of the controversialists. Historians of witchcraft in continental Europe and Scotland, wrestling with the difficulties of their own sources, have wistfully remarked that the English materials seemed peculiarly suited to such inquiry.6 But I find their judgment sanguine; there are Herculean methodological and conceptual difficulties. Richard Kieckhefer, in his pioneering study of medieval European witchcraft, has proposed a system of source criticism designed to disentangle the popular and elite beliefs conjoined in the trial records.7 His model, in which the two elements are treated as essentially inert, simply juxtaposed in a static system, may work for medieval Europe but it does not sit well with the situation in early modern England. It neglects two interrelated phenomena. The first is the social complexity of the administration of the criminal law in England. The second is the vigorous attempt by some of the Protestant clergy not merely to police but to transform popular belief and action.

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1. WITCHCRAFT AND THE LEGAL SYSTEM

To the chagrin of many divines the penal statutes never thoroughly incorporated the theological definition, common to both Catholic and Protestant Europe, of witchcraft as heresy. The Elizabethan statute (1563) made the conjuration of evil spirits and killing by witchcraft capital offenses; a year's imprisonment, with four appearances in the pillory, was the punishment for harm to the person or damage to property by witchcraft and for a number of techniques associated with the white witches. Such leniency troubled the clergy. All witchcraft entailed a league with the devil, they argued, and therefore all witches should die. "It were to be wished," wrote Gifford, "that the law were more perfect in that respect." In 1604 Parliament reconsidered the issue and revised the legislation "for the better restrayninge the saide Offenses, and more severe punishinge the same." Harm to the person was made capital; the penalty against invocation was extended to any who "shall consult, covenant with, entertaine, employ, feede or rewarde any evil spirit"; a new felony, necromancy, was created. Yet the legislators still failed to acknowledge the divines' insistent contention that diabolic compact was the central element in all witchcraft, and harm to property and white witchcraft remained subordinate offenses.8 Further clerical protests were unavailing, and in the late Jacobean and Caroline periods even the 1604 extensions of the 1563 statute were whittled down by judicial interpretation. The judges rejected indictments for witchcraft unless the accused "be charged with the murdering of some person."9 It is the reluctance of the legal and political establishment to accede to clerical persuasion, and the consequent concern of the courts with harm rather than heresy, that has led some commentators to suppose that the records of the English system would embody popular rather than elite concerns. But analysis of the trials demonstrates that this assumption is suspect. Before the clerk of assizes could scrawl his cold "Po. se. cul. ca. null. Judm." at the foot of the formal indictment, a complex series of transactions between various elite and popular elements had occurred.10 This point can be demonstrated at every stage of the judicial process. In accusations the bulk of the charges were rooted in

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popular suspicions. The only significant exception is provided by certain cases of diabolic possession that involved a witch as intermediary.11 Yet even in this particular class of allegations most of the victims, usually adolescents of bourgeois or gentry families, fastened upon those who were popularly reputed to be witches. So the Fairfax girls first accused Margaret Waite, "of evil report for witchcraft," and widow Fletcher, the daughter of "a woman notoriously famed for a witch."12 The imposters of the period, those who pretended possession, also tailored their accusations to fit prevailing local sentiment; like William Perry, they charged those who were already "ill thought of and suspected of such like things."13 Yet, if popular fears generated most accusations, these latter cases should remind us that on many occasions suspicions only surfaced formally as a consequence of some external catalyst. The prosecution of a witch was a troublesome and expensive process; if it failed the accusers might become targets of the witch's malice.14 In consequence, some stimulus was often required to transmute longstanding fears into prosecution. The inhabitants of Knaresborough Forest lived uneasily with the notorious witch clans of the areas until the mysterious illness of Helen Fairfax activated the local magistracy. For at least a decade the villagers of Walton in Essex had feared Joan Robinson. If they offended her they found that their beasts died or aborted, that their horses refused to pull, or their geese to hatch their eggs. In 1582 they brought charges. Undoubtedly they were encouraged to vent their fears by the contemporary witch-hunt in nearby St. Osyths, orchestrated by the zealous magistrate Brian Darcy.15 Thus although the process by which suspicions became formalized is largely invisible, in a significant number of cases it is clear that the popular concerns upon which the action was founded were voiced only after some interaction with the elite. The dialogue between popular and elite beliefs is also clear in the concluding stage of criminal process, the deliberation and verdict of the petty jury. Lord Chief Justice North's rueful comment, that "the countrymen, the triers" were not easily cowed by the authority of the judges in witchcraft cases, should disabuse us of any notion that the jury's verdict simply echoed judicial sentiment. The jury at Lancaster Assizes in 1612 released some of the accused who, in the opinion of the presiding judge, were

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"as deepe in this action as any of them that are condemned to die." A century later the jury at Hertford condemned Jane Wenham despite Justice Powell's derisive demolition of the prosecutor's case.16 The jury's continued performance of its traditional role, as the embodiment of local sentiment and knowledge rather than as a neutral evaluator of evidence under the direction of the judge, may be attributed to two factors. First, pretrial publicity attended a witchcraft accusation. "I have heard already, perhaps, as much as I shall at the time of the tryal," says the man summoned to serve on a jury in Hutchinson's imaginary dialogue. Edward Fairfax permittdd a local freeholder to try a number of experiments on his "possessed" daughters because "he used to serve upon juries at the assizes . . . and therefore might perhaps be one upon [the witches'] . . . trial." Second, as North suggests, the clamor and excitement at the trial itself could sway the jury. The crowd was an important actor in the denouement of the drama: at the trial of Ann Bodenham at Salisbury Assizes in 1653, "the crowd of spectators made such a noise that the judge could not heere the prisoner, nor the prisoner the judge; but the words were handed from one to the other .. . and sometimes not truly reported."17 Popular sentiment, in a complex dialogue with the concerns of the elite, informed the inception and conclusion of criminal proceedings against a witch, and it could be active in the intermediate stages. Prisons where the accused were held prior to trial became places of pilgrimage. Villagers visited the gaol to "see the witches"; to jostle, jeer at, and bait them; but also to seek explanations of mysterious events and resolutions of inchoate tensions that troubled their own communities. Such cathartic rituals might also act as a catalyst, transforming village suspicions into formal accusation.18 Popular beliefs and concerns are omnipresent throughout the trial procedures. But they set in motion, and were subsequently expressed through, a complex machinery staffed by members of the elite who might shape those concerns in the light of their own attitudes. Those attitudes might differ markedly from the norms and values not only of the populace but those expressed in the legislation they were supposedly enforcing. Throughout the period some magistrates were skeptical of witchcraft accusations. Both the leading 16th century intellectuals

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upon the agnostic side, Reginald Scot and Samuel Harsnett, record incidents that demonstrate that some justices of the peace shared their ideas. Reginald Scot's kinsman, Sir Thomas, had "manie poore old women convented before [him]. .. for working of miracles," yet none of these accusations proceeded to trial. Scot also records with satisfaction another Kentish case in which the skillful examination conducted by two J.Ps., "men of great worship and credit," revealed the fraud of the accuser. Harsnett reports with malicious delight how John DarrelTs spectacular career as an exorcist nearly foundered early on the hostility of the Derbyshire magistrate Godfrey Foljambe.19 Some royal judges were equally suspicious of witchcraft accusations. Sir John Holt, Lord Chief Justice between 1689 and 1701, who, as an observer wrote, "seem'd . . . to believe nothing of witchery at all," secured the acquittal of all the eleven persons known to have been tried before him. The prosecutors of Jane Wenham in 1712, lashed by Sir John Powell's sardonic comments at the trial, wrote mournfully of "the incredulity of the judge."20 These skeptics had their counterparts in the early 17th century: Williams at the Abingdon Assizes in 1605, the judges at the Yorkshire Assizes in 1622, those at Lancaster in 1634.21 Other functionaries of the legal system were zealous in hounding witchcraft. Most adhered firmly to the arguments of the divines that witchcraft was necessarily a product of diabolic compact. The Essex J.P. Brian Darcy affirmed that witches "have sworn allegiance" to Satan and that in consequence hanging was too light a penalty. He orchestrated the 1582 St. Osyths witchhunt. Magistrates of like attitude and enthusiasm were Roger Nowell, responsible for the 1612 purge of Pendle forest, and Robert Hunt, who would have ferreted out "a whole clan of these Hellish Confederates" from eastern Somerset in 1665 had his efforts not been thwarted by the "great opposition" of "some then in authority."22 In each of these cases the enthusiasm of a local magistrate transformed an initial accusation into a pogrom; the pattern is apparent in the records from St. Osyths. Brian Darcy, to whom the initial accusation was made, proved to be an enthusiastic and talented inquisitor, eliciting damning evidence from the accuseds' children and inducing confession by a mixture of formidable threats and promises of reprieve: "They which doe confesse the truth of their doeings, they shall have much favour:

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but the other they shall be burnt and hanged." In the course of four separate interrogations Ursley Kemp's initial admission, that she employed a few herbal remedies, was transformed into a confession of her murderous proclivities, her imps, and her accomplices, who were then subjected to Darcy's inquisitorial techniques, so broadening the web of accusation. These attitudes were found not only among local magistrates but among some of the "oracles of the law," the assize judges. In 1602 Lord Chief Justice Anderson, having contemptuously dismissed the suggestion that the alleged possession of the witch's "victim" was a mental illness, assured the London jury that "the land is full of witches, they abound in all places. I have hanged five or six and twenty of them. . . . They have forsaken God, renounced their baptisme and vowed their service to the divill." Lesser functionaries of the judicial system might also hold such opinions: the keeper of Lancaster gaol in 1617 blended interrogation and exhortation to extract one of the accused's confession of his compact with Satan.23 Between the zealot and the agnostic lies the bulk of those members of the elite involved in the operation of the legal system. Very occasionally can we examine their actions, even more rarely the concerns that led them to investigate deeply, simply to proceed with, or to quash, any particular accusation. A unique correspondence provides a cameo of the deliberations of the Malmesbury magistrates in 1672. Their determination to proceed with the cases of only three of fourteen suspects named in a witchscare in the town represented a nice balance between local fears and a sense that they might be thought overcredulous at the assizes by "the Reverend Judges, the learned counsayle there, the persons Ecclesiastique, and the gentry of the body of the county."24 Similar decisions were made in every other case but they are invisible to the historian. English judicial procedures involved a series of formal and informal transactions between the populace and the court machinery. Those who staffed that machinery subscribed to no monolithic perception of the intrinsic nature of the offense. This complexity of the English judicial system suggests that Kieckhefer's model, designed to distinguish the popular from the elite elements in witch trials, could not easily be applied in the English context. The surviving records, in their illusory uni-

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formity, are the product of a most complex process. The argument that "English trials closely reflected village belief is therefore highly dubious.25

2. 'THE PREACHING OF THE WORD'

The medievalist assumes an isolated popular culture, barely touched by the clerical elite's arcane theological concerns; but the post-Reformation period rejects the assumption. In the 16th century many of the parish clergy, Catholic and Protestant, sought to transform popular belief, not merely to monitor it. Throughout Europe the clerical argument of witchcraft-as-heresy was actively disseminated and in some regions — Scotland, the Jura - it was in some measure absorbed by the populace.26 The English clergy, as against their Scottish and continental counterparts, labored under a considerable disadvantage: the law never explicitly embodied a thoroughgoing theological definition of witchcraft. Yet this did not stop them from vigorously asserting their view that the "maine ground of witchcraft" was "that reall covenant that is between Satan and the witch" and that it was this blasphemous compact, rather than the mischief that the witch subsequently wrought, which merited death. Sickened by the gross delusions that flourished among the "ignorant and superstitious people," the clergy's interest lay less in the arcane questions of academic debate than in the transformation of popular opinion. George Gifford, after publishing a treatise, recast his arguments in the form of a dialogue, hoping that this would prove "fitter for the capacity of the simpler sort." Perkin's influential Discourse was first "framed and delivered . . . in his ordinarie course of preaching"; Bernard directed his tract to the yeomen and lesser gentry who served on juries at the assizes.27 The divines did not limit their educational efforts to preaching and writing. They also sought to employ the public forum provided by the judicial machinery to their own purposes. Their role enabled them to interfere at any and every stage of the process. The minister might encourage the prosecutors, advise the examining magistrates, participate in the trial, and exhort the convicted to confession and repentance.28 These interventions were

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not disinterested; the clergy sought to confirm and disseminate their understanding of the essential nature of witchcraft. This is apparent in published accounts of confessions, like those of Mary Smith of King's Lynn (1616) and Elizabeth Sawyer of Edmonton (1621). The trials revealed a typical pattern of local tension: two sharp-tongued women, whose frequent quarrels with their neighbors had unfortunate consequences for the latter. Suspicion was confirmed (to the intense embarrassment of the clerical reporters) by the traditional means: consultation with a cunningman; scratching the witch; burning the thatch of her house. After the women's convictions on these grounds the ministers took over. Both women confessed their compact with the devil. Henry Goodcole, who secured Sawyer's confession, reported that "with great labour it was extorted from her." A team of "reverend and learned" Norfolk divines worked on Smith, who resisted their attentions "in this holy service" for some time before surrendering the required information. The ministers offered a stay of execution "upon hope that more might have been acknowledged" but Smith, no doubt exhausted by their importunities, "in no wise would condescend" that her execution should be deferred.29 The divines were not without lay assistance in their missionary endeavors. Educated laymen, some magistrates or lesser functionaries of the legal system, wrote accounts of investigations or trials that echoed the ministers' theological concerns.30 Dramatists and ballad-makers were also allies, if less welcome. The minister Henry Goodcole was shocked by the "most base and false ballets .. . fitter for an ale-bench" that were sung about Elizabeth Sawyer, but their "ridiculous fictions" were combined with a very proper theological emphasis upon the witch's dealings with Satan.31 My investigation was sparked by the challenge to display the "unarticulated view of reality" of popular culture in early modern England, insofar as it might emerge in beliefs surrounding witchcraft. Ideally, this would entail developing a source criticism designed to distinguish the elements of popular and elite belief conjoined in the records. This task, as I have argued, is peculiarly difficult. The records are products of a most complex social process, involving individuals from every plane of society — actors, moreover, whose perceptions were neither uniform nor consistent

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Nor can the historian assume an unchanging, inert body of popular belief for the early modern period, given the new techniques for disseminating novel ideas and, more important, the sustained missionary endeavors among the populace of elements of the clerical elite. Yet, for all their difficulties, the records do permit some tentative conclusions about popular belief. Following the suggestions of Ginzburg and Monter, we have to concentrate on dissonances, aspects of the interrogations, depositions, and commentaries that are not entirely congruent with the legal or theological definitions of the crime.32 Equally, a sensitive reading of these sources suggests the degree to which popular culture was molded by the concerns of the elite. It is also apparent that the traffic was not entirely in one direction. Of elements of English popular belief, three emerge with some clarity. The ability to manipulate malignant powers inheres chiefly in women. Power descends through matrilineal ties of kinship. Finally, the witch's power is in part a function of her ability to coopt the forces of the animal world. That witchcraft was sex-linked is no revelation. However, it is worthwhile to reexamine some of the explanations that have been offered in the light of my previous discussion of sources. Monter has argued that "the roots of the stereotype seem simple and obvious," a conjunction of the "broad misogynistic streak in European letters which flourished during the Renaissance" with the "misogynistic elements embedded in some parts of the Christian tradition . . . re-emphasized during the . . . Reformation."33 The latter point is certainly apparent in the treaties of the English divines. Perkins is succinct: women "beeing the weaker sexe, is sooner entangled by the devill's illusions" — this backed by the obvious reference to Eve. The theme is embroidered by his followers into a litany of misogynistic tenets. Women are "by nature" more ignorant, more credulous, more obstinate, more impressionable, more proud, more malicious, more ambitious — "the latter because they are bound to subiection.'534 But to emphasize this element is to miss the tone of the English discussion. The divines developed their arguments in opposition to those skeptics who emphasized the incongruity of the devil's seduction of "poore doating old women." John Wagstaffe's heavy irony underscored the point: the Bible's witches

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were "the wise men of this world," rulers, priests, philosophers; by contrast, their modern counterparts are "poor silly contemptible people, for instead of such as King Manasses and Queen Jezebel we now hear talk of this old Gammer and that old Goodwife. It seems the kingdom of darkness is quite altered in its Politicks."35 Challenged, the divines were obliged to provide almost apologetic rationalizations of a phenomenon, the preponderance of female witches, that made little theological sense but that "from experience . . . is found to be true."36 In producing biblical and philosophical justifications no doubt they reinforced existing expectations; but they did not create the sexual attribution. The maleficent powers that witches deployed were traditionally associated with women.37 This simple conclusion raises some doubts concerning other recent explanations of the sexual dimension of witchcraft. Thomas's argument, which subordinates sexual to social status, is clearly inadequate. The preponderance of accusations against women is a product of traditional assumptions about witchcraft; it is not a function of women's greater dependence (an unproved assumption) in early modern England, and thus the greater likelihood that a woman's request for neighborly charity would spark the conflict of communitarian and individualistic values — the idea on which Thomas's hypothesis centers.38 Also suspect is the argument that the persecution of witches was a forcible attempt to compel women to accept the subordinate, limited role of a revised gender ideology. Individual cases undoubtedly illuminate contemporary assumptions about behavioral norms and deviance. Accusations might be leveled against insubordinate wives like Sarah Moordike or Jane Wenham, whose husband had the Hertford bellman publicly "cry down" his wife, "lest any person should trust her to his damage."39 Undutiful daughters were another target; so were women of aggressive sexuality like Mary Sutton of Milton, the mother of three bastard children, whose promiscuity figured in the fantasies of her "possessed" accuser.40 Thus, while witchcraft accusations might be employed to uphold the values of patriarchal society in early modern England, the fundamental sex-linkage, which attributed dangerous powers predominately to women, was not an invention of the 16th century. It was a perdurable component of popular belief.

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The second element of English popular belief is to be found in the assumption that kinship ties often existed among witches. The divines who wrote on witchcraft explained such ties in terms of simple propinquity. Witchcraft, wrote Perkins, was "an art that may be learned" and therefore those close to a convicted witch - servants, neighbors, and friends — might also have been seduced.41 The popular belief was of blood relationship, of lineage. In 1626 the spirits that possessed Edward Dinham denounced Edward Bull and Joan Greedy; they were witches "by discent . . . from the grandmother to the mother, and from the mother to the children." A similar attitude informs the sad confession of Alexander Sussums of Melford in 1645. His mother and aunt had been hung, and his grandmother burned, as witches: "he said he could not help it, for that all his kindred were naught." In 1699 the minister of Coggeshall had to comfort a distraught parishioner; she was the "next relation" of a notorious witch, recently dead, and she was in "terrible fear" that her relative's powers would devolve upon her.42 The idea that witchcraft was in the blood may be related to a popular remedial measure: the victim would gain some relief by scratching the witch until the blood ran. The practice is found in 13th century England and survived into the 19th, despite the objections of Puritan divines ("a means which hath no warrant or power thereunto, either by the word of God or from nature") and the readiness of some magistrates to give damages for assault to those who had been scratched.43 Yet some members of the clerical and magisterial elite continued to sanction the practice, a fact that may explain its continued popular vitality. Confronted by the mysterious and excruciating afflictions of family members, neighbors, or parishioners, individuals might find any possible remedy, however philosophically dubious, appropriate and even justify it casuistically.44 An appreciation of the belief that witchcraft was an inherited characteristic may enable us to penetrate a neglected aspect of prosecution: the selectivity of accusation. Obviously not all poor old women who depended upon the occasional charity of their neighbors were hounded. Appearance ("did you ever see . . . one more like a witch than she is") and certain patterns of behavior may have encouraged denunciations; but blood relationship to a witch aroused fears that might jell into prosecution. Some indi-

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viduals successfully traded upon their family's evil reputation to extort tribute from their uneasy neighbors, as did the witches of Fewston in Knaresborough Forest. The head of one of these clans "had so powerful hand over the wealthiest neighbours about her, that none of them refused to do anything she required; yea unbesought they provided her with fire, and meat from their own tables and did what else they thought would please her."45 The third element of popular belief is that the power of the witch was thought to be a function of her ability to harness, the mysterious forces of the animal world. Familiars, the creatures kept by the witch (Ursley Kemp lodged her two cats, a lamb and a toad, in a large wool-lined pot, providing them with a diet of beer, cake, and white bread) and employed to execute her designs, are a phenomenon virtually unique to the English form of witchcraft. Popular belief attributed to them an importance that skeptics ridiculed and that embarrassed zealots.46 Satan was the efficient cause of the witch's maleficence; Satan and his minions were described in scripture "to be mightie terrible spirits, full of power, rage and cruelties"; why, then, were they masquerading as "such paltrie vermin, as cats, mise, toads and weasils"? Doe you think Satan lodgeth in an hollow tree? is hee become so lazie and idle? hath he left off to be as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour? hath he put off the bloodie and cruell nature of the firie dragon, so that hee mindeth no harme, but when an angrie woman intreate him to goe kill a cow or a horse?

George Gifford, who posed the question in this form, provides an answer: "it is even of subtiltie." The devils seek to persuade men that they "be but meane fellows," engaged in paltry actions, to hide "their mightinesse and effectual working, which they exercise in the dark hearts of men." Thus men turn to trivial and delusory remedies to drive away Satan's power and "are farre from knowing the spirituall battell in which we are to warre under the banner of Christ against the divell." Most commentators repeat this argument; some speculate more widely. Bernard suggests that Satan is socially discriminating: to the rich and educated he appears in human guise, to the "base, sordid, filthy and blockish .. . hee cometh in the baser formes." Glanville argues that, while we know little of the hierarchy of the dark kingdom, it is probable that animal familiars are lower-echelon devils - "servile kinds of spirits." But in all the writings concerning familiars is an uneasy

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defensive sense that these are, in Glanville's troubled phrase, "odd performances."47 The popular belief in animal familiars who attended and assisted the witch, however theologically disquieting, was ultimately incorporated by the divines. The familiar, they came to argue, was given to the witch by the devil upon the conclusion of their compact; Satan's purpose in this was to nourish the delusion that his fearsome power is trivial, "limited by that creature." This composite belief has an interesting side-effect, twisting English practices with respect to evidence away from continental norms. Sixteenth century European commentators, particularly Protestants, laid considerable stress on the devil's mark. The witch, clawed or branded by Satan, retained an insensible scar as the tangible symbol of the compact. The discovery of such stigmata became a crucial proof of guilt; they were a sine qua non for conviction in Geneva by 1600.48 English divines followed their continental (and Scottish) counterparts in describing the anaesthetic mark, yet it scarcely figures in English investigations and trials — the Septs witch-pricker hired by the corporation of Newcastle in 1650 remains an alien figure.49 In England the diabolic mark was transformed from an anaesthetic brand into a sore or teat from which the familiar sucked the witch's blood. The belief that the witch's animal companions were rewarded with her blood seems to have been a traditional element of popular belief. It appears in a developed form in the earliest trials, those of 1566. Mother Waterhouse, having employed her cat to kill a hog, gave him for his labour a chicken, which he fyrste required of her and a drop of her blod. And thys she gave him at all times when he dyd anythinge for her, by pricking her hand or face and putting the bloud to hys mouth whyche he sucked.50

The first example of a continental examination of the suspect's body, but in the context of the popular belief of the witch's feeding her familiar, occurs in 1579. The Southampton magistrates summoned a jury of women to search for "eny bludie marke . .. which is a comon token to know all witches by"; three years later Brian Darcy employed the technique in the St. Osyths investigation. The 1604 statute, which made it a felony to "feede or rewarde any evill and wicked spirit," ensured that the search for

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"marks or paps" would become a feature of most 17th century investigations. Although the suspicions harbored by some physicians concerning the reliability of the test were amply confirmed during the great Lancashire trial of 1634, the searches did not halt. They were systematically employed by Matthew Hopkins, the witchfinder, and his associates during their peregrinations through East Anglia in the mid 1640s, when suspects were examined by "a dozen . . . ancient skilful matrons and midwives."51 The English searches owed much in their detail to continental procedures: the emphasis upon the genitals, for example, very obvious by 1634, seems to be a direct import. The theological framework is the same in both cases: devil worship. The continental stigmata are the tangible symbol of the compact. In England, the familiar's sucking from the witch's teat is a "diabolical sacrament and ceremony to confirm the hellish covenant," an inverted communion and a parody by which the witch is reminded of the original compact when Satan had drawn her blood to sign that document.52 Yet the basic notion of the animal companion rewarded with blood is of popular origin. And, by incorporating this aspect of local "experience," English intellectuals were obliged to explain what was, on the face of it, "so strange an action."53 Maleficent power as a feminine attribute, associated with matriarchal lineage, and the witch's familiarity with and employment of the forces of the animal world — these are elements of the traditional concept of witchcraft that predate the elite's new interest in the subject in early modern England. Consideration of the evidence for these ideas enables us to comment on our second theme, the interaction of popular belief with the concerns of divines and lawyers in the 16th and 17th centuries. Clearly the English elite modified the European intellectual paradigm as they incorporated aspects of local "experience" within it. Theological and philosophical arguments could be adjusted with only a modicum of rationalization to the sex-linkage and kinship aspect of popular belief. But the creatures associated with the witch in the traditional account enforced a more substantial, and ultimately troubling, addition to the theoretical model. While the elite modified their intellectual scheme to accommodate some longstanding elements of popular belief, an inverse process, the absorption into popular culture of ideas generated

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by the elite, is also apparent. This cannot be regarded as a simple imposition upon a plastic medium, however. E. P. Thompson has reminded us that official doctrine was often translated by the lower orders "into a symbolism more appropriate to their own life experience."54 His conclusion is reinforced by consideration of the varying degrees to which elite ideas concerning witchcraft were incorporated into popular belief. I examine three such ideas of elite origin: the diabolic compact, hostility to white witchcraft, and the water ordeal. The first is the compact or covenant. The dissemination of the theory that the diabolic compact was "the maine ground of witchcraft" seems, at first glance, to approximate to a simple model of cultural transformation. It was imposed, temporarily and superficially, by the clerical elite. "Not until the seventeenth century did the diabolic compact figure very prominently in the witch trials."55 It emerges then, I would argue, because it had been accepted into popular culture. This was not the case in the 16th century. Four tracts were published in the Elizabethan period (in 1566, 1579, 1582, 1589) that give details of twenty-five cases from Essex. Each of the tracts commences with a preface or dedication in which the editor emphasizes the satanic origin of witchcraft.56 Yet the doctrine makes at most a peripheral appearance in the cases, and then in only five of them. Furthermore, in these five the idea is entwined with the popular tradition of the witch's familiar. The Hatfield Peveril witches gave blood and promised their souls to "Satan"; but Satan was a "whyte spotted cat," the familiar they shared. Joan Curry of Stisted promised her soul to her two black frogs, "Jack and Jyll." Joan Prentice of Sible Hedingham was accosted by the devil "in the shape and proportion of a dunnish culloured ferrit having fiery eyes." The devil-ferret's greeting was awesome: "Joan Prentice, give me thy soule . . . I am Satan, feare me not; my comming unto thee is to doe thee no hurt, but to obtaine thy soule, which I must and wil have before I departe." Yet when Prentice replied that her soul was Christ's, the ferret simply asked for a drop of blood, promised to do her will, and reidentified himself as "Bidd."57 By the mid 17th century such a conflation of the roles of Satan and the familiar is far less evident. In the examinations made as a consequence of Hopkins's mission the devil appears in human guise,

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he contracts directly with his follower, discusses her domestic problems, has "the carnall knowledge of her as a man." This large group of confessions no doubt owes much to Hopkins's acquaintance with continental practices, his prurient imagination, and the efficacy of the fourth-degree methods he employed against suspects. Yet contemporary confessions, from old and new England, contain similar details.58 And many of the confessions that Hopkins extracted are far from stereotyped: they suggest that the idea of a direct relationship with the devil as the foundation of the witch's power had become generally understood at the popular level.59 This is a tribute to the propaganda of the divines: they had molded popular conceptions> of witchcraft to square with their own intellectual constructs. Their treatises, sermons, and editions of depositions and confessions had borne fruit. These efforts to instill a recognition of the centrality of the satanic contract were seconded by writers whose works were more obviously popular, the authors of broadsides and ballads. The message was also emphasized in public spectacles, not only the theater of court and gallows but in cases of diabolic possession and exorcism, which were invariably well attended and well publicized.60 These cases, which in England usually involved the agency of a witch, clearly emphasized the satanic origins of the witch's maleficent powers. The first English confession of a direct contract with the devil occurs in the 1612 trial in Lancashire: the idea may have become rooted in the popular imagination during the wave of exorcisms in the county by competing Puritan and Roman Catholic factions at the end of Elizabeth's reign.61 By the mid 17th century the propaganda barrage had affected popular concepts of witchcraft. But a belief in the satanic compact was neither universally held nor deeply imbedded. There seems to have been a total gulf of understanding between Jane Wenham and her clerical interrogators in 1711; "she was particularly asked in what manner she made a contract with the Devil. But we could make nothing of her answer, save that an old man did spit upon her."62 When the clerical and magisterial elite abandoned belief in witchcraft their theological addendum faded from popular consciousness. The folklorists seldom discovered it: so Couch found that in Cornwall belief in the power of witches "holds its ground very firmly," but not "the notion that

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mysterious compacts are formed between evil spirits and men."63 The success that the divines enjoyed in promulgating their theological argument concerning the compact should not lead us to general conclusions about the elite's ability to colonize or to the passivity of popular culture, however. Other elements of the divines' theoretical model, for which they contended as fiercely, were effectively rejected by the populace. The second elite idea is hostility to white witchcraft.64 "All witches," wrote Bernard, "in truth are bad witches and none good, but thus we distinguish them after the vulgar speech." The "good" witches, engaged in healing and divination ("blessers," "white witches," and "cunningfolk"), were anathema to the zealots. Their powers, like those of the maleficent witch, were of satanic origin - "one artificer hath devised them all." Indeed, the white witches were more pernicious than their overtly evil counterparts because, while the latter were feared, "the silly people . . . sought unto and honoured" the former "ministers of Satan" for the various useful services they performed. Thus were people seduced "from the light of the gospel and such holy meanes as are offered for their relief and entangled in "the bands of error, ignorance and false faith." And, like the "Goodwife R" of Gifford'd Dialogue, people might shun a powerful ministry, preferring the immediate, tangible remedies for afflictions that the blesser provided. "The good woman . . . doth more good in one year then all these scripture men will do as long as they live."65 The divines in their efforts to counter these seductive dangers were not content to assert that the division of witchcraft into good and bad was theologically invalid. Where possible they emphasized that operationally it was meaningless, rejoicing when a supposed white witch was brought to confess employing his or her power for malign purposes.66 And in this respect the ministers' arguments were congruent with an element of popular belief. At the village level suspicions of maleficent witchcraft might well fix upon those who claimed limited powers for good, women who could mumble a few old charms for healing or divination like Ursley Kemp or "Old Chattox."67 Yet despite their vigorous propagation of ideas that were congruent with a stratum of popular belief, the divines' insistence upon the diabolic origins of beneficent witchcraft never took root except among a small cadre of godly laymen. The latter, when

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afflicted, would ostentatiously reject suggestions that they secure the aid of cunningfolk and might act upon the contention that supposedly "good" witches were perfectly capable of surreptitiously working evil by virtue of their satanic compact.68 But these were a small minority: in general, the divines' insistent arguments went unheard. Why was this so? Thomas is no doubt correct to insist primarily upon the functional utility of the cunningfolk.69 Yet cultural values and expectations were also involved. The elite did not subscribe uniformly to the arguments of the divines, whose failure to secure a revision of the laws, to make white witchcraft a capital offense, testifies to the point. That the cunningfolk enjoyed the extensive patronage of members of the elite must have weakened the effect of the divines' arguments at the popular level. So too must the ability of the white witches to manipulate elite cultural symbols - complexrituals,arcane language and learning - in their practices.70 In both respects there was no easy or categorical distinction to be made between the cunningfolk and the "legitimate" practitioners of medicine or divinity: Redman of Amersham, "whom some say is a conjurer, others say he is an honest and able physician, and doth abundance of good," was a typical figure.71 But the zealots' ability to proselytize was not only weakened by the confusion introduced by contradictory elite norms. More fundamentally, their argument that apparent good might be done by a satanic agency ran counter to ingrained belief. Ministers like John Gaule of Great Staughton, who fulminated against "the vulger conceit" of good witchcraft, might find the scriptures deployed against them by their parishioners - specifically Matthew 12:26 ("And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?'). But this is a legitimation of an older ethical perspective, which Gifford parodied in the robust common sense of his "Goodwife R." The "good woman" did good. Her power, consequently, must be a divine gift: "I thinke the Holy Spirit of God doth teach her." The 1621 testimonial from the villagers of South Perrot insists upon the same point: Joan Guppy was no witch, "contrariwise she hath done much good to many people .. . and . . . in drenchinge of cattell."72 The general rejection of the divines' antipathy to white witchcraft suggests that popular culture was not the passive, malleable

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entity that some historians describe. The active- filtering, and ultimate transformation, of elite concerns emerges equally from considerations of the water ordeal. English intellectuals of the late 16th century knew of the practice of "swimming" a suspected witch. Scot mentions it and Perkins reviews its merits; but for both men.it is a foreign practice. "In other countries," wrote Perkins, "they have a further proofe justified by some that be learned."73 James VI of Scotland, who recommended the technique in his Daemonologie (1597), explained its rationale: water, as the element of baptism, would reject those who had renounced that sacrament by swearing allegiance to the devil. Perkins rejected these arguments despite their royal provenance, and his denial of the validity of the ordeal was followed by his clerical acolytes and by Dr. John Cotta. While divines debated its merits, the ordeal began to be employed in England. The first two recorded cases date from 1612 and 1613. It was used in Northamptonshire by the order of the local magistrates. The three accused floated and "the suspition that was before not well grounded was now confirmed." The contemporary Bedfordshire case had no such official sanction. Master Enger, a wealthy miller, had experienced a number of misfortunes - the death of his son, losses to property, the madness of a servant. He suspected Mother Sutton and her daughter Mary, and a friend advised recourse to the water-ordeal: "I have seene it often tried in the north countrey." Enger and his servants thereupon seized Mary Sutton, beat her "until she was scarce able to stire," and threw her into his mill pond where she "floated upon the water like a planke."74 The peak of English use of the water-ordeal with the approval of the local magistracy occurred during the Civil War. However, the lavish use of the technique in the investigations conducted by Hopkins and Stearne hardened the objections of clerical intellectuals. Judge Godbolt, backed by "the opinion of the unlawfulnesse thereof of a number of "able Divines whom I reverence" (Hopkins's own pious phrase), ordered its abandonment.75 Yet the example provided by officially sanctioned ordeals in the three decades before 1645 proved infectious and the swimming of a suspected witch became a vigorous aspect of popular culture. It flourished into the late 19th century despite the opposition of the elite (a mix of scorn, sermons, and occasional prosecutions of the

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principals for assault or murder).76 The survival of swimming can be explained in functional terms. It served as a public test, resolving village tensions generated by proliferating suspicions of witchcraft; as such it was often sought by those who were the objects of suspicion, like the poor woman of Mears Ashby who, in 1785, "voluntarily offered herself for trial.. . . This poor woman being thrown into a pond, sank instantly and was with difficulty saved. On which the cry was 'No witch! No witch!' "77 Equally, the ordeal could become a punishment, a popular replacement for the official sanction formally abandoned in 1736. In 1751 Thomas Colley was hung for murder after the death of an accused witch in a "swimming." "Many thousands" stood some distance from the scaffold, "grumbling and muttering that it was a hard case to hang a man for destroying an old wicked woman who had done so much mischief by her witchcraft."78 The swimming ordeal was functional but, equally, it was deeply rooted in the symbolic world of popular culture. The ducking of those who challenged the values of the local community, notably scolds, was a long-established practice. What conclusions can be drawn from the records of the witchcraft cases concerning popular belief? First, we must repeat the obvious caveat: the judicial records are the product of a complex interweaving of the concerns of the elite and those of the populace. Yet, by isolating those elements that, though peripheral or anomalous in terms of elite perceptions, regularly emerge in the documents, we can draw some conclusions concerning traditional ideas. Witchcraft is sex-linked; it is an inherited power; it entails the manipulation of the forces of the animal world. The records also permit some discussion of the interactions between popular and elite concerns. This was a symbiotic relationship. The elite felt obliged to incorporate "experience," manifestations of traditional folklore, into their intellectual system. The latter modified popular belief — although the process was not one of passive acquiescence in the values of the dominant classes. Generally, acceptance of the cultural products of the elite depended less upon the vigor of the missionary efforts of divines and lawyers than upon the fit between their concerns and the needs, aspirations, and intellectual expectations of the populace.

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NOTES The author wishes to thank Susan Amussen, Stuart Clark, and Felicity Heal, who read and criticized earlier drafts of this paper; the staff of the Cornell University Rare Book Room, where a splendid collection of witchcraft materials is housed; and his students, particularly Sara B. Johnson, in those of his classes that have focused upon witchcraft in 16thand 17th-century England.

1. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London: 1970); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: 1971), especially chaps. 14—18. 2. Macfarlane has since abandoned this interpretation; see his The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford: 1978), pp. 1-2, 59. 3. H. Geertz, "An Anthropology of Religion and Magic," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (Summer 1975), pp. 71—89; E. P. Thompson, "Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context," Midland History 1 (Spring 1972), pp. 41-55. 4. Thompson, "Discipline of Historical Context," p. 54; Geertz, "Anthropology of Religion and Magic," pp. 72, 74—75. 5. Geertz, "Anthropology of Religion and Magic," pp. 83, 84; Thompson, "Discipline of Historical Context," pp. 51 -52. 6. Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (New York: 1975), p. 239; Christina Larner, Enemies of God (Baltimore, Md.: 1981), pp. 15, 136-37. 7. Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch-Trials: Their Foundation in Popular and Learned Culture (Berkeley: 1976); especially pp. 27- 29, 44-45. 8. The statutes are conveniently available in C. L'Estrange Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (London: 1929), pp. 15-21. For clerical criticism of the Elizabethan statute, see George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches (1593; reprinted by the Percy Society, 1842), p. 96; William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge: 1608), pp. 255—57; of its Jacobean successor, Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand Jury Men (London: 1627), pp. 242, 250, 253-54. 9. Sir Edward Filmer, writing in 1653, first notes the "favorable" judicial interpretation of the statute (An Advertisement to the Jury-men of England Touching Witches [London: 1653], p. 2); I infer that it had been developed two or three decades earlier from Coke's insistence that each of the statute's clauses was to be understood as establishing a particular felony (Sir Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England [London: 1644], p. 45). 10. The abbreviated Latin indicates that the accused pleaded not guilty; that the jury found her guilty; that she had no goods or chattels for forfeiture to the Crown; and that the judgment was executed. See Ewen, Witch Hunting, pp. 80, 93 -97.

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11. For examples, see British Library, Sloane Ms 831 f. 129, and The Most Strange Discoverie of the Three Witches of Warboys (London: 1593), sig. A3v. 12. Edward Fairfax, Daemonologia, ed. W. Grainge (Harrowgate: 1882), pp. 33-35. 13. Richard Baddeley, The Boy of Bilson (London: 1622), p. 70. For examples see the two tracts by Samuel Harsnett, A Discoverie of the Fraudulent Practices (London: 1599), pp. 101-2, and A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London: 1605), p. 224; see also Calendar of State Papers: Domestic Series, 1634-1635, pp. 152-53. 14. Both points - expense and danger — appear in the letter of an anonymous Wiltshire magistrate printed in The Gentleman's Magazine 102 (1832, part 1), p. 492. On expense, see Richard Baxter, The Certainty of the World of Spirits (London: 1691), p. 46; Francis Bragge, A Full and Impartial Account (London: 1712), p. 28. 15. Fairfax, Daemonologia, pp. 33 35; W. W., A True and lust Recorde (London: 1582), sig. F4-F5v. 16. Roger North, The Lives of the Norths (London: 1826), I, 266-71; Thomas Potts, A Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches (London: 1613), sig. V4v; Bragge, Full and Impartial Account, pp. 24—28. For another account of a jury employing its local knowledge, see The Doctrine of Devils (London: 1676), p. 60. 17. Francis Hutchinson, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (London: 1720), p. 2; Fairfax, Daemonologia, p. 80; John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, ed. James Britten (London: 1881), p. 261. 18. W. W., True and lust Recorde, sig. D5; Edmond Bower, Dr. Lamb Revived (London: 1653), pp. 15—30; A True and Impartial Relation of the Informations against Three Witches (London: 1682), p. 24. 19. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London: 1584), sig. (A vi), pp. 127 31; Harsnett, Discoverie, pp. 304, 310-11. 20. Hutchinson, Historical Essay, pp. 58—61; Notes and Queries, 1st series, 11 (London, 1855), p. 499; Francis Bragge, Witchcraft Further Display 'd (London: 1712), intro. 21. London, Public Record Office, Star Chamber Documents, 8/4/10, especially ff. 18-18v; Fairfax, Daemonologia, pp. 122—23, 126 -27; John Webster, The Display ing of Supposed Witchcraft (London: 1677), p. 277. 22. For Darcy, see W. W., True and lust Recorde, especially the dedication; for Nowell, see Potts, Wonderfull Discoverie, especially sig. B2, C3, D3; for Hunt, Joseph Glanville, Sadducismus Triumphatus (London: 1682) part 2, pp. 118-65. 23. British Library, Sloane Ms 831 f. 38; Potts, Wonderfull Discoverie, sig. I4v, 24. The Gentleman's Magazine, 102 (1832, part 1), pp. 405-10, 489-92. 25. Lamer, Enemies of God, p. 136. 26. Lamer, Enemies of God, pp. 112, 133-45; E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland (Ithaca, N. Y., 1976), pp. 142-66. 27. Gifford, Dialogue, p. v. Gifford's treatise was published six years earlier:

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29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Clive Holmes George Gifford, A Discourse of the Subtill Practices ofDevilles (London: 1587); Perkins, Discourse, title page; Bernard, Guide, title page. George More, A True Discourse Concerning the Certaine Possession (London: 1600), pp. 18-19; John Davenport, The Witches of Huntingdon (London: 1646), dedication; Bernard, Guide, sig. A3-A4; Bower, Dr. Lamb, p. 33; C. L'Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism (London: 1933), pp. 369-72. Alexander Roberts, A Treatise of Witchcraft (London: 1616), sig. A3, pp. 46 47, 52, 58; Henry Goodcole, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer (London: 1621), sig. A4, B3, C-Dv. Internal evidence suggests that "W. W.," the author of the account of the St Osyths trials, was Brian Darcy, the investigating magistrate; Thomas Potts, clerk of the assizes, wrote the account of the 1612 Lancashire trials at the request of the judges (Potts, Wonderful Discoverie, title page); the account of the Suffolk witches tried by Sir Matthew Hale in 1665 (A Tryal of Witches [London: 1682]) was written by Bale's marshall (A Collection of Modern Relations.. . Concerning Witches, Part I [London: 1693], preface). Goodcole, Wonderfull Discoverie, preface. The ballads Goodcole criticizes have not survived but elements from them may be incorporated in Thomas Dekker's play, The Witch of Edmonton (see Dramatic Works, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 3 [Cambridge: 1958], pp. 505-14, 551-56). Fora ballad account of witchcraft that embodies the satanic covenant, see Damnable Practices of Three Lincoln-shire Witches (1619), in H. E. Rollins, A Pepysian Garland (Cambridge: 1922), p. 99. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (Baltimore, Md.: 1980), p. 6; Monter, Witchcraft in France, p. 144. Monter, Witchcraft in France, p. 123; see, in general, pp. 115-24. Perkins, Discourse, pp. 168, 169; Bernard, Guide, pp. 91-93; Cooper, Mystery, p. 206; Roberts, Treatise, pp. 4-12, 40-44. John Wagstaffe, The Question of Witchcraft Debated, 2d ed. (London: 1671), pp. 78, 95. As early as 1590 Henry Holland was overtly seeking to answer the skeptics on this point; see his A Treatise Against Witchcraft (Cambridge: 1590), sig. El. Bernard, Guide, p. 91; see also Roberts, Treatise, p. 5. Norman Cohn (Europe's Inner Demons, p. 251) reaches a similar conclusion with respect to the medieval evidence. Thomas, Religion, p. 568. For Moordike, see A Full and True Account of the Apprehending of Mrs. Sarah Moordike (London: 1702); for Wenham, see Bragge, Full and Impartial Account, pp. 13-14,33. Witches of Warboys, sig. F4; Witches Apprehended, Examined and Executed (London: 1613), sig. B, B3v. Perkins, Discourse, p. 202: see also Bernard, Guide, pp. 210-11. Thomas Wright, Narratives of Sorcery and Magic (London: 1851) II, p. 140; John Stearne, A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft (London: 1648), p. 36; J. Boys, The Case of Witchcraft at Coggeshall (London: 1901), p. 22.

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43. Perkins, Discourse, pp. 152, 206—7: for a history of scratching, see Ewen, Witch Hunting, pp. 28, 106-7, 191, 201, 362; for a 19th-century example, The Gentleman's Magazine, 100 (1830, part 1), p. 107. 44. A leading London magistrate, Sir Thomas Lane, sanctioned a scratching in 1700; the vicar of Coggeshall provided a qualified justification in the previous year. A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T. B. Howell (London: 1816), XIV, cols. 643,660,685; Boys, Witchcraft at Coggeshall, p. 19. 45. Fairfax, Daemonologia, pp. 33—34. 46. Thomas Ady, A Candle in the Dark (London: 1655), pp. 36-37; Hutchinson, Historical Essay, p. 77. 47. Gifford, Dialogue, pp. 22-29, 89; Cooper, Mystery, pp. 79-81; Bernard, Guide, pp. 107-8; Glanville, Sadducismus, part 1, pp. 17-21; Bragge, Witchcraft Further Display 'd, p. 32. 48. Monter, Witchcraft in France, pp. 157-66; Lamer, Enemies of God, pp. 110-12; Perkins, Discourse, p. 203; Cooper, Mystery, p. 88. 49. Ralph Gardiner, England's Grievance Discovered in Relation to the Coal Trade (London: 1655), pp. 107-9. Ewen (Witchcraft, pp. 322, 345, 455) notes some other cases involving the search for the insensible mark. 50. Ewen, Witchcraft, pp. 72-76; Ewen, Witch Hunting, p. 319. 51. Ewen, Witchcraft, pp. 74, 246-47; W. W., True and lust Recorde, sig. D4, E5v; Wallace Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England (New York: 1968), pp. 151, 154—55. For medical doubts about the reliability of the test, see John Cotta, The Triall of Witchcraft (London: 1616), p. 123. 52. Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches (London: 1647), p. 3. 53. Glanville, Sadducismus, part 1, p. 17; Hopkins, Discovery, pp. 2-5. 54. Thompson, "Discipline of Historical Context," p. 52. 55. Thomas, Religion, p. 444. 56. The Examination and Confession of Certaine Wytches, ed. H. Beigel (Miscellanies of the Philobiblion Society, 8 [1863-4]), pp. 17-19. (This rare tract was published in 1566: reference to the text will be to Ewen's transcription [Witch Hunting, pp. 317-24], but this omits the preface.) A Detection of Damnable Driftes, Practized by Three Witches (London: 1579), title page, sig. A2-A2v; W. W. True and lust Recorde, dedication; The Apprehension and Confession of Three Notorious Witches (London: 15 89), sig. A2. 57. Ewen, Witch Hunting, pp. 317-24; Apprehension and Confession, sig. A3,B. 58. Intercourse with the devil was confessed in trials in Kent, Northumberland, and Connecticut in the 1650s: A Prodigious and Tragical History of the... Condemnation of Six Witches (London: 1652), p. 3; Mary Moore, Wonderfull News from the North (London: 1650), p. 24; Lyle Koehler,^ Search for Power (Urbana, 111.: 1980), pp. 241-42. 59. For confessions that do not suggest stereotyping, see those of Elizabeth Clarke concerning her sexual relations with the devil and those of the two Dunwich women concerning their discussions with Satan on econo-

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62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

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mic and family problems: Stearne, Confirmation, p. 15; A True and Exact Relation of the S ever all Informations (London: 1645), pp. 2—3, 6; Ewen, Witch Hunting, pp. 298-99. The Triall of Maist. Dorell (London: 1599), p. 94; Baddeley, Boy of Bilson, pp. 65-66; The Most Wonderfiill and True Stone, of a Certain Witch Named Alse Gooderige (London: 1597), pp. 4, 12. Potts, Wonderfull Discovene, sig. B2v; for exorcism in Lancashire, see John Darrell, A True Narrative (London: 1600), pp. 7-13; More, True Discourse, pp. 12-13, 50-81; Historical Manuscripts Commission: Calendar of the Manuscripts of the . . . Marquis of Salisbury, 8 (London: 1899), pp. 213-14. Bragge, Full and Impartial A ccoun t, p. 21. Notesand Queries, 1st series, 11 (1855), p. 497. Thomas (Religion, pp. 177—279) provides a superb general account of white witchcraft. Gifford, Discourse, sig. B2, C4, H, I; Gifford, Dialogue, pp. 9, 44, 47, 48, 70, 71, 116; Holland, Treatise, sig. Bl, F4-G2v; Perkins, Discourse, pp. 174-77; Roberts, Treatise, p. 2; Cooper, Mystery, pp. 19, 200, 232; Bernard, Guide, sig. A5v-A6, pp. 126-29, 155. Cooper, Mystery, p. 225; More, True Discourse, p. 22. W. W., True and lust Recorde, sig. Al-A2v, A7; Potts, Wonderfull Discovene, sig. E2v-E3. The two Newcastle women prosecuted in 1660—1 are in the same class: Depositions from the Castle of York, ed. James Raine (Surtees Society, 40 [1861]), pp. 82, 92-93. In none of these cases is there any obvious interposition of the clergy's conflation of good and bad witchcraft. Wonderfull and True Stone, pp. 18, 22, 23; British Library, Sloane Ms. 831 f. 7v; [Moore,] Wonderfull News, pp. 7, 10. Thomas, Religion, p. 278. In his unpublished tract "The Winnowing of White Witchcraft," the physician Edward Poeton emphasized both the status of the white witches' clientele and their manipulation of orthodox religious and medical symbols (British Library, Sloane Ms 1954 ff. 165-67). William Drage, Daimonomageia (London: 1665), pp. 39-40. British Library, Sloane Ms 1954 f. 17 Iv; John Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witchcraft (London: 1646), p. 32; Gifford, Dialogue, pp. 116-18; London, Public Record Office, Exchequer 163 17/5. Perkins, Discourse, pp. 206—7; for the whole question of the water ordeal and a substantial bibliography, see G. L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (New York: 1956), pp. 235-38, 539-44. Witches of Northamptonshire, sig. C2; Witches Apprehended, Examined and Executed (London: 1613), sig. C2v, C3. Hopkins, Discovery, pp. 6-7; Stearne, Confirmation, pp. 18-19. The test was employed by magistrates elsewhere — see [Robert Greenstreet,] The Examination, Confession, Triall and Execution of Joane Williford (London: 1645), pp. 2, 4.

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76. For sermons, see Joseph Juxon, A Sermon Upon Witchcraft Occasion'd by a Late Illegal Attempt to Discover Witches by Swimming (London: 1736); Isaac Nicholson, A Sermon Against Witchcraft (London: 1808), p. viii. For prosecutions, see The Gentleman's Magazine, 1 (London: 1731), p. 30; 21 (1751), pp.186, 198, 375, 378; 30 (1760), p. 346; 32 (1762), p. 596; 39 (1769), pp. 411, 506. 77. The Gentleman's Magazine, 55 (1785, part 2), p. 658. For other examples, see Bragge, Full and Impartial Account, p. 10; "Diary of the Rev. Humphrey Michel," ed. J. H. Hill, in Transactions of the Leicestershire Archeological and Historical Society, 1 (1866), p. 378. 78. The Gentleman's Magazine, 21 (1751), p. 378.

Sin, Melancholy, Obsession: Insanity and Culture in 16th Century Germany

H. C. ERIK MIDELFORT

Like sharp stones in a rushing stream, the words we use can be worn smooth and indistinct in the rush of argument and communication. It does not take much reflection to see that the "popularity" of "popular culture" depends necessarily upon what we mean by the people. Shall we mean the illiterate in contrast to the literate, the unlearned, the folk, the poor, the laity, the rural, the commoners, the powerless, the participants in the little tradition, the subordinate classes, or the transmitters of oral tradition? Each of these definitions has inspired a body of scholarship that seems to mark off one group of persons as "the people" in contrast to the learned, powerful, elite cultivators of the great tradition. And yet these terms do not cut clearly. The laity were not all unlearned; the literate were not all wealthy and powerful; many participants in oral tradition were equally enthusiastic participants in the written tradition. Peter Burke has argued that popular festivals in 16th century Europe were popular in the sense that everyone, from all cultural strata, took part.1 In this usage, then, "the people" includes everyone and the term loses its analytic edge; it has been rubbed smooth. The same linguistic entropy threatens "culture" as well. It is relatively well-defined in anthropology but historians are creating a term that is well on its way to anarchy.2 Hunger, for example, is not usually seen as a cultural artifact, but the ways in which we learn to express, appreciate, experience,

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and evaluate our hunger are clearly cultural. I assume that even in its origins madness is (and has been) partly cultural, that it too depends on acquired (learned) behavior and ideas to some extent and is not simply determined by genetics or chemicals. But I shall also argue that, being cultural, madness can change. I see no point in trying to reduce the variety of mental disorders from other ages and cultures to the system currently fashionable in the West. The modern psychiatric consulting room or hospital is no adequate sample of human abnormality; elsewhere, and in other times, mental afflictions have been different. Rather than add to the futility of reworking such round, smooth terms, I prefer to proceed as if we know what these concepts mean even if we cannot agree on exact definitions. Theologians, after all, can worship together even if they disagree bitterly in the lecture halls. And in my investigations into the history of madness in Germany it is important to be able to distinguish the attitudes and opinions of people who had little or no contact with the written word, especially in ancient languages, from the attitudes and opinions of the learned participants in'academic tradition. I do not mean to imply that there was a constant and unbridgeable gulf between the popular and the elite. In fact, part of my argument depends on the difference between religious and medical traditions in the 16th century, one eager to instruct the multitudes while the other strove to restrict its learning. Culture I will apply with extreme generality to all acquired (learned) behavior and ideas that are not purely instinctive, genetically determined, or the result of physical and chemical causes. These apparently bland affirmations are far from being generally accepted. Scholars dealing with the 16th century, for example, have been eager to diagnose the ailments of that society and of its members in modern terms; they have, in consequence, ignored at least two historical developments of some importance.3 On the one hand it seems clear that although melancholy declined as a theme for painters, it was becoming increasingly common in literature and in life toward the end of the 16th century. I shall argue that the medical condition of melancholy was actually on the rise and that we have here a real change in the way certain people regarded their world and themselves, not just a shift of labels attached to some unchanging fundament. On the other hand, there can be little doubt that demon possession also became much more

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common in the second half of the 16th century. Again, I shall argue that this represents a real shift of mental behavior, not just a rearrangement of labels. The explanation of these two developments has implications for our understanding of "popular culture." Perhaps it is our familiarity with Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia I that has blinded us to the fact that as a medical diagnosis melancholy was not prominent in early 16th-century Germany.4 But then psychiatry, if we may use such a term, was itself poorly represented among the medical arts and was not yet part of the rigorous academic tradition. By this I mean that when German physicians expressed themselves on questions of mental disorder, their thoughts had a popular tone and a naive substance that would seem distinctly superstitious and incoherent by the standard of just seventy-five years later. Elite, academic culture was blended with popular culture and in the first half of the 16th century physicians often ran the risk of drifting away from the medical teachings of the ancients into theology or empirical (rather than academic) herbalism. If even the physicians were little concerned with melancholy, can it surprise us to find very little melancholy among the madnesses of the early 1500s? I shall illustrate what I mean from several medical writings. Walter Ryff was a famous medical popularizer, whose numerous works often rashly and radically reduced all illnesses, including madness, to pharmacological problems best treated with fruits, herbs, flowers, wine, and sugar.5 Although reviled by Vesalius as a plagiarizer, Ryff represented well the editorial energies and philosophical naivety of the early 16th century in Germany. But some have been so offended by Ryff that his memory is controversial, so I shall examine more closely another example. In 1507 Johann Tollat published his Margarita medicine, in which he laid claim to the help of his adviser, "the most experienced physician, Dr. Schrick," and of the "world famous University of Vienna."6 His short treatise is actually another list of herbal remedies for a chaotic hodge-podge of human ills and diseases; it lacks even the normal anatomical order, from the ills of the head to those of the foot. Tollat affirmed that anyone desiring the gift of chastity (celibacy?) should inscribe the paternoster on a sheet of paper and carry it with him: "It takes away evil desires and makes one chaste." But if that proved ineffective, "boxwood drives out the devil too, so that he can have no place in the house, and therefore

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Platearius says one should bless [the house] on Palm Sunday." So useful was boxwood that one could use it for illnesses of the brain as well, if one ground up the leaves and mixed them with lavender water.7 There were other herbs to use against demons. Carrying berivica jugrien on one's person deprived the devil of all his power; and hanging it over one's door prevented all evil magic. If witches should enter a house so protected, they would complain at once that they had been betrayed and flee. "So with this herb one can gauge which people have the evil spirit in them."8 So, too, carrying gagatis rendered the devil powerless "so that he cannot do what he gladly would.. . . And thus Magister Enax says that it is good against diabolical melancholy."9 It is not especially surprising to find these sorts of gross confusion between pharmacy and demonology, but it is striking that Tollat appeals to learned authorities in order to construct his argument. In a little book by Johann Schöner of Karlstadt (1477-1547) we again find brief, vague assertions and a remarkable naivety with respect to mental disorders. Trained as a theologian, mathematician, and astrologer, Schöner did not flinch from the duty he felt to publish the diverse recipes and cures he had assembled. From the outset he stressed that one had to match the cure to the time of year and to the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twenty-eight mansions of the moon. But Schöner proceeded to ignore his own injunction and descended to the rank empiricism of a herbalist. "When someone goes mad he should be often treated with Meisterwurtz and the 'herb'; soak a cloth in the cooked herb and bind it to the head, and he will come to his senses. Or give him gentian and rue seed in vinegar to drink. Or give him swallow's heart in honey to eat."10 That was his prescription for mental disorders, and it is little wonder that academic physicians preferred a less popular and more theoretical approach. We find a more refined analysis in the works of Lorenz Fries (14907-1531), a physician from Colmar who defended Arab medicine against its contemporary detractors. In Fries we find none of the confusion between matter and spirits of Tollat, none of the desultory herbalism of Schöner, but instead a resolute effort to interpret all human ills in physical terms. Even Aristotle had misled many, "not only by slandering the divine art [of medicine] but also by turning many of his disciples from the true path."11 To recover the respect of jurists, philosophers, and poets

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for the practice of medicine, Fries insisted that it was much more than the oft-ridiculed analysis of urine. It was properly a holy art requiring exact knowledge of human nature (e.g., the seven naturals, three counter-naturals, and six non-naturals). In practice Fries recommended a humoral and herbal therapy that counteracted disease by increasing or decreasing the qualities of hotness, coldness, wetness, and dryness, in the manner precisely familiar to us from countless other Renaissance medical treatises. As an intellectual construct this sort of medicine marked a real advance beyond the chaos of Tollat and the empiricism of Schöner. On mental disorder, for example, the physician's main task was to discover the source of the illness, from which one could usually deduce a remedy. If a patient suffered headaches from too much black bile, for example, he would very likely be unable to sleep, be full of fears, and show a leaden or pale face, a slow, small pulse, and clear urine. "Treat him by giving him a good routine and see to it that he is not sad." Every morning he was to receive four half-ounces of oximellis mixed in the water of oxtongue.12 It is noteworthy that Fries also gave melancholy extremely short shrift even though, within a few decades, it was to become the premier disease of the 16th century, encouraging (and responding to) the growth of a dense literature.13 Fries considered mania a more complex disease. It had a wide variety of causes ranging from too much wine, the bite of a rabid dog, and poisonous air, to highly seasoned food. Any of the four humors could be corrupted to produce mania as well. If the patient had too much blood, he might "talk constantly, dance, hop about, sing, and be gay, desiring to hear harp music all the time. His pulse is fast and hard, his urine red and thick, and his age eighteen to twenty. His complexion is warm and moist, and the season is also warm and moist."14 On other occasions it is corrupt choler that causes mania — complaining, screaming, murderous drives. At still other times, phlegm was at fault, producing the delusion that one was surrounded by water or a continuous sleep. And finally, of course, black bile or melancholy could induce a mania that was characterized by constant sadness and fearfulness, the sense of being "among dead and monstrous things" and the "constant worry that someone would catch him."15 With all the confidence of a systematician, Fries provided humoral and herbal prescriptions for all of these serious disorders. Even when dealing with

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sexual complaints, Fries scrupulously avoided moralizing comment and contented himself with adjusting the patient's bodily fluids.16 In so doing he was practicing the physician's discretion, that traditional attitude of somatic reductionism by which medical doctors set themselves off from their philosophical, theological, and juridical colleagues. When Philip Melanchthon undertook to describe the soul and its ills, both physical and spiritual, he seems to have followed Fries's exposition rather closely.17 Inevitably this caused Melanchthon some trouble, for somatic reductionism could not well be brought to agree with man's nature as a moral agent. Sin had to originate in the free will of man and of the devil.18 Without freedom man would be no more than a cow, Melanchthon thought, incapable of sin and beyond all punishment.19 And so the theologian had to part company from his medical model in order to avoid serious theological trouble. For most theologians, as indeed for most persons, man had to be more than his humors. But for the medical academic the charms of somatic reduction were precisely that it excluded extraneous concerns and allowed a retreat from (or advance beyond) the dolors of common sense. It does, in fact, seem that one of the tacitly accepted features of any profession or discipline is a sturdy aversion to what I shall simply call "common sense." As Renaissance German physicians recoiled from the popular culture of vulgar empiricism, they came to appreciate more fully the theoretical mysteries of Galenism. Academic psychiatry in Germany became not less but more Galenist in the second half of the 16th century, despite the legendary discoveries of Vesalius and others. In psychiatric subjects what mattered most was getting the theory straight, and theory was nowhere clearer than in the formal academic disputation. Academic disputations and the inaugural dissertation provided a parade ground for academic discipline, the display of learned commentary on ancient Greek medical sources in an environment inured to the siren songs of theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, and folk wisdom. I do not mean to imply that academic medicine was a preserve of autistic nonsense, but only that it sustained its proud autonomy and its professional status by maintaining a vigil over its chosen sources and by excluding popular notions and the dogmas of the other professions.

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Increasingly in the 16th century, medical professionals in Germany distinguished themselves from popularizing dabblers by resolutely holding that all phenomena (and especially all diseases) were physical in origin. Such an attitude meant rejecting all popular and learned attempts to link disease with sin or immorality, or with demons, or with God himself. The somatic approach to all human ills spelled a sharp foreshortening of the human horizon, it seems, but it also shielded medicine from the vulgar intrusions of those who were not trained to appreciate the charms of the somatic dispensation.20 One reason for this rise of a specifically academic psychiatry was the growing prominence of classical topics after 1550. Printed dissertations became common after 1570 and they reveal a new fascination surely inspired in part by the fact that Galen and Hippocrates had themselves lavished substantial attention on mental disorders; from these sources Renaissance physicians had both an ancient tradition and an esoteric language on which to draw. Thus, as psychiatric topics entered the medical elite mainstream in Germany, the influence of Galen actually rose. Of the 241 disputations registered by Oskar Diethelm for the period 1550-1650, fully 138 dealt with just four classical disorders: melancholy, hypochondriasis (and hypochondriacal melancholy), mania, and phrenesis. After 1600 theses on hysteria, another classical topic, became increasingly common as well.21 To gauge the extent of the shift from the earlier part of the 16th century, I shall examine briefly a few of the disputations held at the University of Tübingen. The earliest of the Tübingen disputations was the \580Disputatio medica de capite et cerebro hominis proposed by Andreas Planer, with Helias Waldner of Memmingen as respondent.22 It was an extraordinary analysis, not so much because of the wide variety of diseases it had to consider (for that was common enough) as because of an obsessive emphasis on the hair. The chief problem in studying the brain, of course, was that physicians in the 16th century had no way of observing a living brain directly. They had to infer everything from easily visible signs; and Galen provided the structure of inference. There were, he had thought, two kinds of sign, innate and external, from which one might hope to estimate the condition of the brain. The innate signs consisted of its size and shape (thesis 3), its operations in sensation and sleep

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(theses 7,8), the bodily motions prompted by the brain (thesis 9), the mental guides to the brain revealed in the sensus communis, phantasy, memory, and thought (theses 11, 12), and finally the process of nourishing the brain, which could be studied indirectly through cerebral excrements of various sorts (theses 14, 15). The external signs were composed of the way in which the brain responded to the six non-naturals: air, sleep, food and drink, rest and exercise, excretion and retention, and the mental affections. Physicians could also gauge the state of the brain from the heat, toughness, and moisture of the cerebral substance. Too soft, too thick, too hot a brain - all spelled mental difficulties. How could one judge these qualities? Cerebral excrements in the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth could all be observed but excrement could also flood the lungs, nerves, throat, veins, and stomach, producing an amazing variety of physical ills (theses 32-42). Faced with this bewildering catalog of cerebral symptoms, the physician might turn with some relief to a consideration of the hair, as discussed by the ancients. At first this bizarre suggestion might seem arbitrary but on reflection the emphasis on hair is a perfect example of the medical retreat from common sense into a system of judgment that could only be based on the secret wisdom of the academy. Since hair sprouted almost from the brain itself, its growth, color, strength, and texture revealed something of the brain itself (theses 46-51). A dry brain, for example, produced curly, strong, fast-growing hair, but also baldness. Such persons could be unusually wise. A humid head, on the other hand, resulted in straight hair and no baldness. Such persons were often dull, stupid, and somnolent (theses 68-72). Without the structure of inference provided by Galen, where would this dissertation have been? Without the search for secret coherence, indeed, where would any science be? A very different disputation was that of Daniel Moegling of Tübingen, held at Heidelberg in 1584 with Johann Kühn (Cuno) as respondent.23 Beginning with the theological proposition that man was made in God's image, having the use of reason, the formal quaestio asked how it was that phrenesis, or brain fever, could push man so far from reason that he became like the wild beasts. Although this opening statement seemed to invite theological commentary on the human nature of the mad, the dissertation quickly entered calmer medical waters by asserting that the cause and cure

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of such metamorphoses were matters for the physician. Revealing a keen grasp of philosophical complexities, however, Moegling and Kühn noted that, strictly speaking, the human mind was not liable to death or disease; but so long as it was trapped in this prison of a body (in hoc ergastulo), it had to abandon its integrity and attach itself to the inferior faculties of the soul and use the ministry of the interior and exterior senses. Being in this way a composite construction, it became capable of suffering (thesis 1). Here then is a disputation in which major theological and philosophical issues do break the surface but only in such a way as to justify the medical concern with physical things. Phrenesis was defined as inflammation of the brain with acute fever and delirium (thesis 4). After distinguishing various sorts of phrenesis, Moegling and Kühn turned to a detailed consideration of its etiology, symptomatology, and prognosis. Since cure was exceedingly difficult, they noted that the prudent physician would rather avoid the disease altogether (thesis 38). Still, a cure could be effected if the matter of the disease (i.e., the corrupt phlegm) were destroyed or if the source of the corruption itself were corrected. All of these procedures required the use of purges "with a skilled moderation" (docta moderations) (theses 38, 43, 46), or diet, or venesection, or baths (theses 46, 47, 52, 54, 55, 57). Only when the crisis was past and the disease was in retreat did Moegling and Kühn concede the utility of applying to a feverish head such ancient remedies as split chickens, capons, piglets, and dogs (all alive but with their spines cut), or the fresh lung of a ram, or warm woman's milk (thesis 60). Since it seems unlikely that Moegling actually held these steps to be effective, it is noteworthy that he relegated this advice to the stage when the patient was already on the mend. Ultimately, diet and soothing surroundings were of prime importance in helping the patient. Friends too could help to calm and flatter him. But if these measures failed to cool the rage, the patient might need chains to confine him. Even so, it was not for the physician to take this last step but for the sick man himself and the attending officials "to make sure that all is done in right order" (thesis 64). This last statement seems to reveal an awareness of the ethical issues involved in the incarceration or involuntary coercion of the mad. Physicians were to have no part in such decisions. Medicine was not yet an arm of the state.

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In 1588 the Tübingen professor Georg Hamberger presided at another disputation on phrenesis with Balthasar Bruno (Braun) as respondent.24 Although the dissertation follows the same explanatory scheme as that of Moegling and Kühn four years earlier, it is striking how much room there was for shifts in emphasis. Hamberger began, for example, by stressing the divergent views of the ancient prisci medici (quaestio). Instead of worrying about corrupt phlegm reaching the head, this disputation concentrated on the dangers of overly thin blood shooting up to the brain and, finding its return blocked, causing inflammation. Brain fever could also be caused by an excess of bright bile (choler), which could turn men into animals requiring chains. Hamberger was not bothered by the question of who should make such decisions. In 1602 yet another Tübingen professor, Sebastian Bloss, undertook a discussion of phrenesis with Matthaeus Müller as respondent.25 Unlike the disputations considered so far, this one cited a fair amount of recent literature instead of commenting exclusively on Galen and Hippocrates. In addition, it showed a lively interest in the effects of brain fever on each of the three internal senses: phantasy, memory, and the common sense (theses 12—20). After agreeing that phrenesis was so dangerous that most patients died, the disputation turned nonetheless to cures; here, amid the common recommendations of blood-letting and purging, was an unusual emphasis on cooling off the patient with special drinks and drugs. Among the prescriptions for oil of roses and violets, for lettuce water and the like, the modern reader may be amused to discover recipes for a medicinal blend of the juice of oranges or lemons and sugar: lemonade? These were truly exotic prescriptions in the 16th and early 17th centuries, for both sugar and citrous fruits were very likely hard to find except in a well-stocked pharmacy. With this emphasis on drinks and drugs, however, Bloss and Müller were clearly defending an approach to phrenesis that differed from that of their Tübingen predecessors. The Galenic system was a house of many mansions. Some of the other Tübingen dissertations showed a similarly creative approach to their topics. We cannot say that they were aimed at producing original conclusions; in fact, the basic assumption in most cases was probably that originality was no virtue. And yet the spread of printed disputations probably encouraged an elite taste for novelty, creativity, or even originality. So long as

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disputation of Andreas Planer with Johann Fabri (Schmidt?) as content himself by answering timeless questions with timeless answers. But as professors and respondents began to publish these questions and answers, an unspoken urge may have shaped the old materials into new forms, probing and testing the old conclusions. Although this urge did not send physicians rushing to their laboratories for new evidence and controlled experiments, pages as dusty and neglected as these medical dissertations evince an effort to arrive at new conclusions or at least to apply the old wisdom to more recent topics. A good example of this tendency may be found in the 1593 disputation of Andreas Planer with Johann Fabri (Schmidt? ) as respondent.26 Entitled De morbo Saturnino sen melancholia, the dissertation was not content with the ancients but pushed on to consider whether witches were really only melancholy. "The demon can make one melancholic. Melancholy persons possessed by the devil are healed not by use of drugs but by prayers. The melancholy are authors of their own death, not all of the things of hell. Old women with melancholy tend to become witches." These assertions betray a feeble attempt to keep medicine and theology separate, especially in the claim that the possessed need prayer rather than medical care. But in the last claim, the authors seemed to agree with Johann Weyer and his disciples that witches were mainly melancholy, a controversial claim usually taken to imply that their confessions were the worthless products of hallucination. If so, we have here another case of medical reduction, the invasion of medical thinking into the domain of law and theology. We do not know what was actually said at this point of the disputation; as it stands the utterance is a gnomic reminder of how little we know of the past. In addition to these extraordinary extensions, this disputation also revealed an unusual interest in man as the microcosm, as comprehending, reflecting, and participating in all of the parts and processes of the cosmos. Although the theme was a commonplace among neo-Platonic thinkers, medical writers often paid it no mind. Here, however, Fabri's dedicatory epistle to Duke Ludwig of Württemberg contended that human diseases were strictly analogous to earthly disturbances. Just as the sun is sometimes eclipsed by the moon, so too the brain is sometimes darkened by phrenesis, delirium, mania, dizziness, suffusions, and cataracts.27

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Melancholy was analogically distinct: it corresponded rather to the windy, cold, dry season of autumn, a time of sad storms. The forging of this neo-Platonic link between melancholy and the cosmos made this disputation unusual and it is not surprising that it also referred to the pseudo-Aristotelian claim that melancholy predisposed one to genius.28 This medical dissertation approached philosophy and theology so closely that it ran the risk of overstepping the professional boundaries that ensured physicians an autonomous existence as a separate discipline. That danger did not exist for the authors of a 15 86 dissertation on diseases of the temperament.29 Andreas Planer presided with Thomas Schlaier of Tübingen as respondent. Together they analyzed the ways that heat, cold, moisture, and dryness could become unbalanced and produce a host of psychosomatic disorders. The disputants allowed no moral, ethical, or theological issues to interfere with a strictly medical approach. These examples from the University of Tübingen do not prove my argument but they should suffice to indicate that the disputations produced by the academic medical establishment were not the monophonic chorus that some historians have supposed. But it is also true that we do not find here the adumbration of modern psychiatry. Rather, they lift the veil from a learned, elite culture that was often content to comment self-indulgently on its Greek founders. Even unadventurous writers on psychiatric topics were able to forge a variety of responses to the classical questions. There was no orthodoxy except with respect to the language and the language-game within which an answer had to be given. The language of Galen encouraged academic physicians to abandon the popular or vulgar herbalism and "superstition" that was sometimes to be found in German medicine before about 1550. The theoretical search that Galen inspired supported an academic method of inquiry that allowed psychiatry to transform itself from within. The 17th century produced a number of physicians who unconsciously affirmed Galen's method even as they rejected his conclusions. But it must also be said that the Galenic system blunted the use of case histories, of detailed clinical reporting, and of categories of disease drawn from philosophy and theology notably disorders brought on by guilt and demon possession. This academic retreat from the world of theology and folklore also meant that physicians did not proselytize the folk, baptizing

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them in the name of Galen or preaching the word of humoral therapy. We find here a clear and early effect of what Peter Burke suggestively described as the separation of high culture from popular culture.30 In any event academic physicians were too thinly spread and too dependent on clients who could pay their fees to have had a genuinely popular audience before the rise of health insurance and socialized medicine.31 Academically trained physicians did, however, make demonstrable inroads on the understanding of their wealthy client-patients. If one surveys the peculiar subgroup of mad princes in 16th-century Germany, for example, one notes humoral therapy replacing the common practice around 1500 of simply locking or chaining an offensive prince in some (preferably remote) castle, where he could no longer waste the substance of his territory, shoot randomly at his neighbors, or threaten his attendants. When relatives decided that it was time to take forceful steps against Count Heinrich of Württemberg (in 1490), Margrave Friedrich the Elder of Ansbach and Bayreuth (in 1515), and Margrave Christoph I of Baden (in 1518), medical care was the least of their concerns; the princes were treated as indifferently as the more famous case of Juana la Loca of Spain, the mother of Charles V.32 This subject merits detailed investigation but it seems clear that, by the late 16th century, princes were regularly subjected to humoral treatment (purging, bleeding, change of diet) and were expected to improve. Albrecht Friedrich, Duke of Prussia, for example, was given the best, up-to-date care by learned physicians.33 Under the care of an English physician, mad Duke Johann Wilhelm of JülichCleves improved so dramatically in the 1590s that he was released from confinement and allowed to remarry.34 Such cases, common by the late 16th century, were virtually unimaginable in Germany two or three generations earlier. Princes had come to think in Galenic, humoral, and that is to say therapeutic, terms. Such changes in attitude and in therapy do not, of course, imply that the mental disorders of princes had actually changed as well; but that is a strong possibility that warrants close scrutiny. When poor people got sick, they were smitten with different ills. When they went mad, they went mad with a difference.35 Hospital records from the 16th century rarely tell us anything about the symptoms of their patient-residents but a cache of Rezeptionsreskripte from Hesse suggests that the key characteris-

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tics of the poor mad were "nonsense" and "silliness," an inability to work, and regression both socially and legally to the status of children. These documents were petitions requesting entry into the newly founded hospitals of Haina (for men) and Merxhausen (for women); and they form a source unparalleled (at least in Germany) for the study of mental disorders among the poor. Of the 183 persons for whom a petition survives for the period 1550-1622, 39 were retarded, brain-damaged, or mentally ill. In some cases the petition simply remarks, as with Catrin Koch in 1577, that she was now "thoroughly and completely bereft of her senses and reason, and there is no hope of improvement."36 Or the document might describe a girl admitted to Merxhausen in 1612 as simply "crazy and mute."37 But the descriptions could be much richer. If we try to construct rough categories for these afflicted persons, we confront at once the often impossibly vague language regarding the poor. The petitioners had no real interest in or familiarity with medical diagnosis; they intended simply to demonstrate that a person needed care and no fancy Latin description was necessary for that. Therefore, in several cases the writers referred to persons who were "bereft of reason," "senseless," "silly," or "nonsensical." When such a person was a child one can, perhaps, conclude that he or she was retarded but that is not clear in every case. When the person was aged, forgetful, and "crazy," one suspects senility but again it is a guessing game. I have constructed a table of such guesswork, however, with the hope that it is not thoroughly arbitrary. Table I: Frequency of Brain Damage, Retardation, and Mental Illness among Applicants to Haina and Merxhausen Probable Classification Retarded or brain damaged at birth Brain damaged in accident Mentally ill, "mad" Senile "Foolishness" produced by epilepsy Indistinct cases Total

Number of Cases 11 2 16 1 1 8 39

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Although many of these diagnoses remain questionable, several cases shine a bright light into some dark corners of social behavior. Take the case of Steffan Mauschnud, whose four daughters pleaded with Landgrave Phillip late in 1560 to take their father into Haina. He had entered Haina originally as a brother early in 1560 but, after fighting there, he had been expelled. The four daughters were trying to care for him but he fought and argued with them too, demanding food and drink at all times and flying into rages in which he "strikes and tries to strangle us." In addition, in this "staggeringly expensive time," the daughters claimed that they could not afford to keep him. To strengthen their petition they reminded the Landgrave that God would surely reward his charity if he would readmit their father. On 18 July 1587 a widow asked Landgrave Wilhelm to take pity on her. When her husband had died three years earlier, she had been left with six small children, one of whom was "bereft of his senses." He was now fifteen and "so lacking in reason that he is a great domestic affliction and a heavy burden." If pious neighbors had not taken care of him, he would already have drowned or harmed himself with fire. And now with prices so high, she could not earn enough to support him. The boy was ordered admitted to Haina on 10 October 1587. These cases suggest that family members and neighbors were expected to care for their own and were to seek aid from the territorial prince only when a person became unmanageable. This was clearly the case with Heinrich Senger of Homberg, who fell into a more and more serious madness. The local pastor, Caspar Arcularius, explained that "some years ago Senger had behaved strangely both in words and in deeds, as if he was a madman." The neighbors had tried to practice "Christian love, patience, and sympathy" in tolerating him, but matters grew worse. Now, in 1593, his reason and human understanding were totally deranged and he was too much for his wife, "who up to now has cared for him not only with great trouble and effort, but also in danger of life and limb." The neighborhood could "no longer stand to see this miserable specimen, nor could they trust this irrational and senseless person, who might at any hour or moment either kill himself (as he doubtless would have long ago if his wife and neighbors had not kept watch over him) or wound others by hitting, stabbing, burning, etc., and thus produce irreparable damage." Arcularius concluded

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that Senger must be admitted to Haina "in order that greater misfortune be avoided and that the poor man be helped." The pastor did not neglect to say that God would richly reward such charity "both here temporally and then eternally, in body and soul." Senger was, of course, admitted to the stout cells of Haina. In 1581 a widow burdened with four deformed, retarded, mute children petitioned for relief, saying that their monstrous form and foolish behavior made them useless for work and incapable of learning. Landgrave Wilhelm noted in his order that he had seen these sorry creatures himself and that two of the four should be taken from her and sent to Haina. Another example of gradually strained neighborhood tolerance was the case of Daniel Hoffmann of Stauffenberg. In this case, in March 1590 the Burghermaster and Council of Stauffenberg wrote to the Captain of Giessen, Rudolf Wilhelm Raw, ten kilometers distant, to inform him that Hoffmann was acting as if possessed. He had been found in his barn with a loaded gun and a handful of flax tow (used for starting fires) under his coat. On other occasions he had thrown knives and other weapons at his wife and children and had tried to stab them; he had beaten his wife with his fists and had tried to strangle her. The officials of Stauffenberg noted that he needed to be restrained in a "blockhouse" or with chains while further advice in the matter was being sought. Two weeks after this letter was sent, Hoffmann was ordered confined at Haina where he would stay until God might send him a recovery. In 1596 a father in Schmalkalden appealed to Landgrave Moritz that his son be admitted to Haina. For three years the boy had been a singer in church and school but now he was so "disabled and crazy" that he "cannot well be tolerated here because of the danger." He should be admitted to Haina "until he improves." The Superintendent, Johann Clauer, agreed and ordered the boy confined "until Almighty God sends him some improvement." In mid-July of 1587, Barba, wife of Jost Bucking from Alsfeld, appealed for the confinement of her husband because he was bereft of his senses. The treasurer of Alsfeld confirmed that Bucking had been mad for four years, when he had begun irritating several citizens with "unnecessary wrangling and hatred, which no one had previously noticed in him since he had been zealous in obeying the church and God's Word, and had always seemed reasonable and beyond reproach." But complaints about him began

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to accumulate. "He began to fantasize, which from day to day got so much worse that at last he went completely out of his mind and in the past had to be kept in chains at great expense and danger. Several times he worked himself free from them, and if dear God had not especially prevented it, he would have done horrible damage with fire or murder." Bucking had been a wool-weaver and had eight children, some of them still small. Although he had been "rather lively" while working, ever since he was chained and prevented from working he "seems all used up." In an earlier letter Bucking's wife noted that her husband used to beat her whenever he was displeased; and he was wont to go into the bam and stables carrying fire. Thus he clearly endangered not only her but the children and neighbors. Since chaining him, they had all been reduced to poverty. He tore all his clothes and any bedding given to him. There seemed no hope that he would, without God's special mercy, ever recover his reason. On 29 August he was ordered to be admitted to Haina. Let us look at one more example of Hessian madness among the folk. In 1579 the neighbors of widow Aldehens complained that they were strained beyond endurance. The widow "had become completely mentally disabled in the past year, and we had to care for her for a time." But then God sent her some improvement and the local community hoped that they were free of their great burden. Now she was much worse "and is once again completely disabled and senseless, and she smears herself with excrement so gruesomely and so horribly that no one really wants or dares to stay with her." So the neighbor women made a special chest for her where they kept her day and night. This expedient was expensive, however, and the petitioners claimed that they had neither the incomes nor the husbands to keep up this system much longer. Widow Aldehens was sent to Merxhausen with her children, where she was to stay until God sent some improvement. A number of things are striking in these cases from village society. First, the petitioners and the Hessian officials often assumed that mental condition could improve, although in every case the cure was ascribed to God alone. Second, there are surprisingly few instances in which a mad person was thought to be demonically possessed. In these documents only Daniel Hoffmann came close, and no-one seems to have treated him differently just because he acted "as if possessed." It is hard to say whether this lack of con-

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cern about demonic possession was a result of Protestant skepticism about possession and exorcism, or whether such ideas had never been current among the Hessians. We do know that Landgrave Ludwig in 1575 advised that a woman thought by some to be possessed was "more likely suffering from weakness in her head and silly melancholy thoughts." (It is noteworthy that this suggestion of melancholy came from a prince, not a villager.) He urged that she be cared for and comforted with God's Word "so that she may be discretely diverted from such heavy thoughts." The landgrave had heard that an exorcist named Hornberger, from Weidenhaussen, had made bold to drive the evil spirit from her. In future the landgrave commanded that such efforts be severely punished; and two Marburg preachers were to talk to Hornberger and warn him to give up his own "phantasei."38 The third noteworthy fact about all 39 cases of mental disability in these Hessian hospital records is that the local community was obviously supposed to exhaust its own resources before turning to the territorial administration. Even when spouse and neighbors had been driven to despair, however, they did not apparently attack, punish, ridicule, or demean the afflicted. They may have chained or confined such people but only as a last resort and to prevent self-inflicted injury as well as harm to others. It would be going too far to claim that such communities were "in dialogue" with the mad, that they deeply respected or were in awe of lunatics and the feeble-minded. But they did continue to practice what they saw as Christian patience and charity. These case histories are one way of observing the Haina and Merxhausen hospitals for the poor at work. Some simple statistics, extracted from the same Rezeptionsreskripte, provide a more general view. I have grouped the 183 cases between ca. 1550 and 1622 into decades and into four broad categories of basic disability (and five categories of combined disabilities) (see Table II.) The largest group of residents at Haina and Merxhausen was composed of men and women often described simply as "old, lame and disabled." This group also includes those persons suffering from leprosy, physical deformity, deaf-mutism, epilepsy, and desperate poverty. The second broad category includes orphans and disabled, deformed, and crippled children. The third category contains cases of mental disability, retardation, madness, and brain damage. And finally, a fourth category singles out the blind, who made up a

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